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

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

Court of Appeals of Arizona / Joined 1997 / Active

Joseph W. Howard

Judge, Court of Appeals of Arizona

Joseph W. Howard is a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Arizona, serving since 1997. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1950 · age 76
Tenure: Since 1997 · 29 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1997	Court of Appeals of Arizona	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Howard authored 182 published opinions for the court (1997–2017), plus 4 dissents and 5 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Fontes (235 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. 79 of these were attributed to Howard 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
1998	State v. Fontes	986 P.2d 897	235
2007	Dube v. Likins	167 P.3d 93	145
2000	Englert v. Carondelet Health Network	13 P.3d 763	118
2008	City of Tucson v. Clear Channel Outdoor, Inc.	181 P.3d 219	111
2007	FLYING DIAMOND AIRPACK, LLC v. Meienberg	156 P.3d 1149	106
2001	State of Arizona v. Powers	23 P.3d 668	93
1998	Link v. Pima County	972 P.2d 669	82
2008	State v. Lopez	175 P.3d 682	80
2004	Kuehn v. Stanley	91 P.3d 346	75
2008	State v. Moreno-Medrano	185 P.3d 135	73
2000	In Re the Marriage of Dorman	9 P.3d 329	70
2000	In re United States Currency In Amount of $26,980.00†	199 Ariz. 291	62
2007	State v. Gay	150 P.3d 787	58
2005	Hourani v. Benson Hospital	122 P.3d 6	57
2010	Bennett v. Baxter Group, Inc.	224 P.3d 230	56

Showing the 15 most-cited of 191 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 Court of Appeals of Arizona reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court is Joseph W. Howard on?: Joseph W. Howard is a Judge of the Court of Appeals 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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29 years on the Court of Appeals of Arizona. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).