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 2009 / Former Justice

John Pelander

Justice, Supreme Court of Arizona

John Pelander was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Arizona, who joined the court in 2009. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1951 · age 75
Tenure: 2009 · 17 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2009	Supreme Court of Arizona	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Pelander authored 69 published opinions for the court (2000–2019), plus 2 dissents and 2 concurrences. Most cited: State of Arizona v. Phil Gutierrez (915 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. 54 of these were attributed to Pelander 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
2012	State of Arizona v. Phil Gutierrez†	229 Ariz. 573	915
2003	Andrews v. Blake	69 P.3d 7	441
2011	State v. West	250 P.3d 1188	376
2016	Demetrius L. v. Joshlynn F./d.L.†	239 Ariz. 1	321
2016	State of Arizona v. Mark Goudeau†	239 Ariz. 421	125
2010	State v. Don Chappell	236 P.3d 1176	73
2011	State v. Prince	250 P.3d 1145	69
2017	State v. Don Jacob Havatone· Concurrence†	241 Ariz. 506	65
2016	State of Arizona v. Jerry Charles Holle†	240 Ariz. 300	57
2014	Orca Communications v. Ann Noder Et vir/pitch Public†	236 Ariz. 180	55
2016	Amanda Watts v. Medicis Pharmaceutical Corporation†	239 Ariz. 19	54
2013	State of Arizona v. Eric Boyston†	231 Ariz. 539	52
2012	State of Arizona v. Rodney Eugene Hardy†	230 Ariz. 281	52
2014	State v. Israel Joseph Naranjo†	234 Ariz. 233	50
2013	State of Arizona v. Edward James Rose†	231 Ariz. 500	50

Showing the 15 most-cited of 73 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 was John Pelander on?: John Pelander was a 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

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