How do judges of the Hawaii Intermediate Court of Appeals reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.

Hawaii Intermediate Court of Appeals / Joined 1982 / Served to 2007

James S. Burns

Judge, Hawaii Intermediate Court of Appeals

James S. Burns was a Judge of the Hawaii Intermediate Court of Appeals, who joined the court in 1982. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1982–2007 · 25 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1982	Hawaii Intermediate Court of Appeals	–	–

Education

Benedictine College
Villanova University

Judicial Record

In our data, Burns authored 531 published opinions for the court (1982–2007), plus 2 dissents and 8 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Miller (51 citations).

Published, precedential opinions from the CourtListener corpus. Counts and rankings are objective and recomputable: how we count. We describe the record, not the judge. 305 of these were attributed to Burns by a unique court-, date-, and surname-match against our roster (marked ), because CourtListener recorded no author for them. Each links to the official text to verify. How we match.

Selected opinions

Year	Case	Citation	Cited
1983	State v. Miller†	671 P.2d 1037	51
2001	State v. Ferrer	23 P.3d 744	47
1999	State v. Ito	978 P.2d 191	46
2000	Citicorp Mortgage, Inc. v. Bartolome	16 P.3d 827	41
2005	State v. Grace	111 P.3d 28	40
2000	State v. Mitchell	15 P.3d 314	39
1982	State v. Halemanu†	650 P.2d 587	38
1982	State v. Tuua†	649 P.2d 1180	36
2005	Joy A. McElroy, M.D., Inc. v. Maryl Group, Inc.	114 P.3d 929	35
2000	State v. Kealoha	22 P.3d 1012	33
1997	Jackson v. Jackson†	933 P.2d 1353	32
1989	Malek v. Malek†	768 P.2d 243	32
1985	State v. Correa†	706 P.2d 1321	32
2000	State v. Graybeard	6 P.3d 385	31
1987	Eaton v. Eaton†	748 P.2d 801	31

Showing the 15 most-cited of 541 authored opinions in our data. “Cited” is inbound citations across the CourtListener corpus. Case links open the ruling’s full text (CourtListener) or its page here; read the methodology and verify against the primary source.

Questions & answers

How do judges of the Hawaii Intermediate Court of Appeals reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.
Which court was James S. Burns on?: James S. Burns was a Judge of the Hawaii Intermediate Court of Appeals.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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25 years on the Hawaii Intermediate Court of Appeals. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).