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

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

Utah Court of Appeals / Joined 2010 / Active

Michele M. Christiansen

Judge, Utah Court of Appeals

Michele M. Christiansen is a Judge of the Utah Court of Appeals, serving since 2010. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2010 · 16 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2010	Utah Court of Appeals	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Christiansen authored 233 published opinions for the court (2010–2018), plus 1 dissent and 15 concurrences. Most cited: Layton City v. Carr (102 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. 249 of these were attributed to Christiansen 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
2014	Layton City v. Carr†	2014 UT App 227	102
2014	State v. Lee†	318 P.3d 1164	44
2012	State v. Kozlov†	2012 UT App 114	31
2013	Rayner v. Rayner†	316 P.3d 455	28
2015	State v. Liti†	2015 UT App 186	27
2016	Fish v. Fish†	2016 UT App 125	22
2011	K.F. v. State†	268 P.3d 831	22
2018	State v. Oliver· Concurrence†	2018 UT App 101	20
2017	State v. King†	2017 UT App 43	20
2016	State v. Dozah†	2016 UT App 13	20
2018	State v. Ringstad†	2018 UT App 66	19
2014	State v. Clark†	322 P.3d 761	19
2013	State v. Walker†	2013 UT App 198	18
2011	Jacobsen v. Jacobsen†	2011 UT App 161	17
2017	ConocoPhillips Co. v. Utah Department of Transportation†	2017 UT App 68	16

Showing the 15 most-cited of 249 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 Utah Court of Appeals reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court is Michele M. Christiansen on?: Michele M. Christiansen is a Judge of the Utah Court of Appeals.

Sources

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

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