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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Supreme Court of Arkansas / Joined 2013 / Former Justice

Josephine L. Hart

Justice, Supreme Court of Arkansas

Josephine L. Hart was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Arkansas, who joined the court in 2013. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1943 · age 83
Tenure: 2013 · 13 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2013	Supreme Court of Arkansas	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Hart authored 865 published opinions for the court (1920–2020), plus 99 dissents and 38 concurrences. Most cited: Aetna Life Insurance Co. v. Spencer (78 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. 153 of these were attributed to Hart 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
1930	Aetna Life Insurance Co. v. Spencer	32 S.W.2d 310	78
2015	Westerman v. State	2015 Ark. 69	67
1927	Pfeiffer v. Missouri State Life Insurance	297 S.W. 847	67
1925	Clark v. State	276 S.W. 849	52
1929	Stanley v. Gates	19 S.W.2d 1000	50
2013	Adams v. State· Dissent†	427 S.W.3d 63	49
1929	Merchants' Transfer & Warehouse Co. v. Gates	21 S.W.2d 406	47
2015	Conte v. State· Concurrence†	2015 Ark. 220	43
2014	Bohannon v. Robinson· Concurrence†	2014 Ark. 458	43
1929	Claybrooke v. Barnes	22 S.W.2d 390	41
2016	Starling v. State· Dissent†	2016 Ark. 20	40
2014	Conley v. State· Concurrence†	2014 Ark. 172	40
2013	State v. Colvin· Dissent†	427 S.W.3d 635	40
2013	Jackson v. Norris†	426 S.W.3d 906	40
1925	Sims v. Ahrens· Concurrence	271 S.W. 720	40

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,002 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 Arkansas reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Josephine L. Hart on?: Josephine L. Hart was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Arkansas.

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.

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