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

The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.

Supreme Court of Arizona / Joined 2017 / Active

John R. Lopez IV

Vice Chief Justice, Supreme Court of Arizona

John R. Lopez IV is a Vice Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Arizona, serving since 2017. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2017 · 9 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2017	Supreme Court of Arizona	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Lopez authored 10 published opinions for the court (2017–2019). Most cited: Trisha A. v. Department of Child safety/l.A./l.A. (35 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. 10 of these were attributed to Lopez 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
2019	Trisha A. v. Department of Child safety/l.A./l.A.†	446 P.3d 380	35
2019	Marcie Normandin v. Encanto Adventures†	441 P.3d 439	22
2017	Michael Soto v. Anthony M Sacco†	242 Ariz. 474	18
2019	State of Arizona v. Courtney Noelle Weakland†	434 P.3d 578	15
2017	Pawn 1st LLC v. City of Phoenix/jachimek†	242 Ariz. 547	8
2019	State v. Chalice Renee Zeitner†	436 P.3d 484	6
2018	Joshua Stanwitz v. reagan/outlaw Dirty Money†	429 P.3d 1138	3
2018	State of Arizona v. Anthony Lito Hernandez†	417 P.3d 207	3
2018	Alma S. v. Dep't of Child Safety†	425 P.3d 1089	1
2018	Robin Silver v. Pueblo Del Sol Water Co†	423 P.3d 348	0

Showing the 10 most-cited of 10 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 Arizona reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court is John R. Lopez IV on?: John R. Lopez IV is a Vice Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Arizona.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

See something wrong? Report an error. Fixes are logged in the corrections log.

9 years on the Supreme Court of Arizona. Data as of 2026-07-02. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).