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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Court of Appeals of Arkansas / Joined 1981 / Served to 1986

Lawson Cloninger

Judge, Court of Appeals of Arkansas

Lawson Cloninger was a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Arkansas, who joined the court in 1981. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1981–1986 · 5 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1981	Court of Appeals of Arkansas	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Cloninger authored 186 published opinions for the court (1981–1986), plus 10 dissents and 3 concurrences. Most cited: Ketron v. Ketron (36 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. 163 of these were attributed to Cloninger 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
1985	Ketron v. Ketron· Dissent†	15 Ark. App. 325	36
1984	Guidry v. J & R Eads Construction Co.· Dissent†	669 S.W.2d 483	28
1984	Jones v. State· Dissent†	668 S.W.2d 30	28
1981	Victor Industries Corp. v. Daniels	611 S.W.2d 794	23
1986	Stallnacker v. State	715 S.W.2d 883	21
1986	Shipley Baking Co. v. Stiles	703 S.W.2d 465	20
1982	Small v. State	632 S.W.2d 448	19
1986	McIllwain v. Bank of Harrisburg	713 S.W.2d 469	18
1982	Black v. Riverside Furniture Co.	642 S.W.2d 338	18
1984	Gooch v. Gooch· Dissent†	664 S.W.2d 900	17
1984	Lyons v. Lyons	679 S.W.2d 811	16
1983	American Transportation Co. v. Payne	661 S.W.2d 418	16
1983	Callaway v. Callaway	648 S.W.2d 520	15
1982	Bell v. State	644 S.W.2d 601	15
1982	Geurin Contractors, Inc. v. Bituminous Casualty Corp.	636 S.W.2d 638	15

Showing the 15 most-cited of 199 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 Arkansas reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Lawson Cloninger on?: Lawson Cloninger was a Judge of the Court of Appeals 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.

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