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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Court of Appeals of Mississippi / Joined 1998 / Served to 2011

L Joseph Lee

Judge, Court of Appeals of Mississippi

L Joseph Lee was a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Mississippi, who joined the court in 1998. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1945 · age 81
Tenure: 1998–2011 · 13 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1998	Court of Appeals of Mississippi	–	–

Education

University of Southern Mississippi

Judicial Record

In our data, Lee authored 621 published opinions for the court (1998–2011), plus 15 dissents and 9 concurrences. Most cited: Colenburg v. State (132 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. 427 of these were attributed to Lee 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
1999	Colenburg v. State	735 So. 2d 1099	132
2001	Langston v. State	791 So. 2d 273	52
2011	Rhodes v. Rhodes· Concurrence†	52 So. 3d 430	48
1999	Kinney v. State	737 So. 2d 1038	39
2004	Thomas v. State	881 So. 2d 912	37
1999	Ford v. State	737 So. 2d 424	35
2001	Morrison v. MSET	798 So. 2d 567	34
1999	Ford v. State	753 So. 2d 489	33
2010	Mayers v. State†	42 So. 3d 33	28
2007	Howard v. Howard	968 So. 2d 961	27
2002	Graham v. State	812 So. 2d 1150	26
2000	Wolf v. Stanley Works	757 So. 2d 316	26
2006	Funderburk v. Johnson	935 So. 2d 1084	25
2000	Hobgood v. Koch Pipeline Southeast, Inc.	769 So. 2d 838	24
2000	American Nat. Ins. Co. v. Hogue	749 So. 2d 1254	22

Showing the 15 most-cited of 646 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 Mississippi reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was L Joseph Lee on?: L Joseph Lee was a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Mississippi.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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