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 2010 / Active

Karen R. Baker

Chief Justice, Supreme Court of Arkansas

Karen R. Baker is a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Arkansas, serving since 2010. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1961 · age 65
Tenure: Since 2010 · 16 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2010	Supreme Court of Arkansas	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Baker authored 450 published opinions for the court (1934–2021), plus 63 dissents and 36 concurrences. Most cited: Roberts v. State (212 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. 189 of these were attributed to Baker 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
2013	Roberts v. State· Concurrence†	425 S.W.3d 771	212
2014	Hobbs v. Gordon	2014 Ark. 225	140
2016	Green v. State†	2016 Ark. 386	99
2018	THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS v. MATTHEW ANDREWS· Dissent†	2018 Ark. 12	74
2014	Prock v. Bull Shoals Boat Landing· Dissent†	2014 Ark. 93	72
2013	Singletary v. Singletary· Dissent†	2013 Ark. 506	65
2014	Nelson v. State· Dissent†	2014 Ark. 91	62
2012	Hobbs v. Jones· Dissent†	412 S.W.3d 844	61
2013	Taylor v. State†	427 S.W.3d 29	58
2015	Mancia v. State	2015 Ark. 115	54
2019	McArthur v. State†	577 S.W.3d 385	50
2013	Temco Construction, LLC v. Gann· Dissent†	427 S.W.3d 651	48
2013	Green v. State	2013 Ark. 497	47
2012	Arkansas Lottery Commission v. Alpha Marketing· Dissent†	386 S.W.3d 400	46
2015	Johnson v. State	2015 Ark. 387	44

Showing the 15 most-cited of 549 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 is Karen R. Baker on?: Karen R. Baker is a Chief 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

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16 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).