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

The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.

Supreme Court of Arizona / Joined 2002 / Served to 2010

Michael D. Ryan

Justice, Supreme Court of Arizona

Michael D. Ryan was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Arizona, who joined the court in 2002. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1945 · age 81
Tenure: 2002–2010 · 8 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2002	Supreme Court of Arizona	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Ryan authored 61 published opinions for the court (2003–2010), plus 1 concurrence. Most cited: State v. Newell (376 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. 3 of these were attributed to Ryan 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
2006	State v. Newell	132 P.3d 833	376
2003	Bilke v. State	80 P.3d 269	144
2005	State v. Glassel	116 P.3d 1193	129
2003	State v. Tucker	68 P.3d 110	101
2003	State v. Hickman	68 P.3d 418	100
2004	State v. Aguilar	97 P.3d 865	99
2006	Falcon Ex Rel. Sandoval v. Maricopa County	144 P.3d 1254	95
2003	State v. Christian	66 P.3d 1241	81
2007	State v. Smith	159 P.3d 531	79
2003	State v. Thompson· Concurrence†	65 P.3d 420	74
2004	State v. Torres	93 P.3d 1056	66
2003	State v. Rutledge	66 P.3d 50	65
2006	Mejak v. Granville	136 P.3d 874	63
2003	Hullett v. Cousin	63 P.3d 1029	60
2004	State v. Murdaugh	97 P.3d 844	58

Showing the 15 most-cited of 62 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 Arizona reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Michael D. Ryan on?: Michael D. Ryan was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Arizona.

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.

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