How do judges of the Supreme Court of Kentucky reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Supreme Court of Kentucky / Joined 1981 / Served to 1983

John J. Hara

Justice, Supreme Court of Kentucky

John J. Hara was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Kentucky, who joined the court in 1981. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1981–1983 · 2 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1981	Supreme Court of Kentucky	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Hara authored 9 published opinions for the court (1982), plus 2 dissents. Most cited: Henderson v. Commonwealth (23 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. 8 of these were attributed to Hara 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
1982	Henderson v. Commonwealth	636 S.W.2d 648	23
1982	Smith v. Commonwealth	634 S.W.2d 411	13
1982	Commercial Union Assurance Companies v. Howard†	637 S.W.2d 647	11
1982	Commonwealth v. Schaefer†	639 S.W.2d 776	7
1982	Gardner v. Commonwealth†	642 S.W.2d 584	4
1982	Central Kentucky Production Credit Ass'n v. Smith· Dissent†	633 S.W.2d 64	4
1982	Moore v. Roberts ex rel. Roberts†	684 S.W.2d 276	3
1982	Marsh v. Gentry	642 S.W.2d 574	3
1982	Moss v. Holloway Construction Co.· Dissent†	644 S.W.2d 331	3
1982	Cavins v. Commonwealth†	639 S.W.2d 766	2
1982	Walton v. Lee†	634 S.W.2d 159	1

Showing the 11 most-cited of 11 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 Supreme Court of Kentucky reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was John J. Hara on?: John J. Hara was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Kentucky.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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