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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Supreme Court of Arkansas / Joined 1990 / Served to 1990

Otis H. Turner

Justice, Supreme Court of Arkansas

Otis H. Turner was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Arkansas, who joined the court in 1990. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1927 · age 99
Tenure: 1990–1990

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1990	Supreme Court of Arkansas	–	–

Education

University of Arkansas

Judicial Record

In our data, Turner authored 44 published opinions for the court (1979–1992), plus 9 dissents and 7 concurrences. Most cited: City of Fayetteville v. Edmark (98 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. 38 of these were attributed to Turner 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
1990	City of Fayetteville v. Edmark· Concurrence†	801 S.W.2d 275	98
1990	State v. Sypult· Concurrence†	800 S.W.2d 402	62
1990	Fireman's Insurance v. Arkansas State Claims Commission	784 S.W.2d 771	52
1990	Burnette v. Morgan	794 S.W.2d 145	46
1992	Bryant v. Mars	830 S.W.2d 869	40
1990	Curtis v. State· Dissent†	783 S.W.2d 47	40
1990	Parette v. State	786 S.W.2d 817	38
1990	Robinson v. City of Ashdown· Dissent†	783 S.W.2d 53	37
1990	Willson Safety Products v. Eschenbrenner	788 S.W.2d 729	33
1990	Salley v. State	796 S.W.2d 335	32
1990	Arkansas Gazette Co. v. Goodwin· Concurrence†	304 Ark. 204	31
1990	Colbert v. State	801 S.W.2d 643	30
1990	Hamm v. State· Concurrence†	782 S.W.2d 577	28
1990	Moore v. State	801 S.W.2d 638	26
1990	Hill v. State	798 S.W.2d 65	25

Showing the 15 most-cited of 60 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 Arkansas reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Otis H. Turner on?: Otis H. Turner was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Arkansas.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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Joined the court in 1990. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).