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 1980 / Served to 1980

Richard L. Mays

Justice, Supreme Court of Arkansas

Richard L. Mays was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Arkansas, who joined the court in 1980. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1980–1980

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1980	Supreme Court of Arkansas	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Mays authored 42 published opinions for the court (1980), plus 10 dissents and 1 concurrence. Most cited: Price v. State (68 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. 31 of these were attributed to Mays 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
1980	Price v. State	597 S.W.2d 598	68
1980	Robinson v. State	598 S.W.2d 421	62
1980	Daniels v. City of Fort Smith· Dissent†	268 Ark. 157	53
1980	Jackson v. Petit Jean Electric Co-Op	606 S.W.2d 66	52
1980	Davis v. Cox· Dissent†	593 S.W.2d 180	45
1980	Norton v. State	609 S.W.2d 1	40
1980	Hulsey v. State· Dissent†	268 Ark. 312	39
1980	Ross v. State	594 S.W.2d 852	32
1980	Leggins v. State	609 S.W.2d 76	29
1980	Ply v. State· Dissent†	606 S.W.2d 556	29
1980	Countryside Casualty Co. v. Grant	601 S.W.2d 875	28
1980	Kreutzer v. Clark	607 S.W.2d 670	27
1980	Alexander v. State	598 S.W.2d 395	24
1980	Boone v. State	603 S.W.2d 410	23
1980	Thomas Ex Rel. Inmon v. Inmon· Dissent†	594 S.W.2d 853	23

Showing the 15 most-cited of 53 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 Richard L. Mays on?: Richard L. Mays 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 1980. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).