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 2003 / Active

Maurice Portley

Judge, Court of Appeals of Arizona

Maurice Portley is a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Arizona, serving since 2003. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2003 · 23 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2003	Court of Appeals of Arizona	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Portley authored 94 published opinions for the court (1992–2018), plus 2 concurrences. Most cited: Arizona Department of Economic Security v. Matthew L. (182 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. 41 of these were attributed to Portley 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
2010	Arizona Department of Economic Security v. Matthew L.· Concurrence†	225 P.3d 604	182
2009	Castro v. Ballesteros-Suarez	213 P.3d 197	77
2013	State v. Reyes†	232 Ariz. 468	67
2014	Michaelson v. Garr†	234 Ariz. 542	50
2014	State v. Solis†	236 Ariz. 285	40
2007	In Re Jesse M.	170 P.3d 683	32
2004	State v. Cowles	82 P.3d 369	30
2010	Gamboa v. Metzler	224 P.3d 215	28
2005	Marriage of Brebaugh v. Deane	118 P.3d 43	28
2008	Strawberry Water Co. v. Paulsen	207 P.3d 654	27
2010	Stoddard v. Donahoe†	228 P.3d 144	25
2010	Strait v. Strait	224 P.3d 997	25
2008	Lawrence R. v. Arizona Department of Economic Security	177 P.3d 327	25
2007	Melgar v. Campo	161 P.3d 1269	24
2006	Town of Gilbert v. Maricopa County	141 P.3d 416	24

Showing the 15 most-cited of 96 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 Maurice Portley on?: Maurice Portley 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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23 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).