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

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

Court of Appeals of Alaska / Joined 1980 / Served to 2012

Robert G. Coats

Judge, Court of Appeals of Alaska

Robert G. Coats was a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Alaska, who joined the court in 1980. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1980–2012 · 32 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1980	Court of Appeals of Alaska	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Coats authored 599 published opinions for the court (1981–2012), plus 40 dissents and 41 concurrences. Most cited: Municipality of Anchorage v. Serrano (65 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. 676 of these were attributed to Coats 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
1982	Municipality of Anchorage v. Serrano†	649 P.2d 256	65
1985	Lerchenstein v. State†	697 P.2d 312	62
1987	Rodriquez v. State†	741 P.2d 1200	51
1982	Nell v. State†	642 P.2d 1361	46
1991	Whiteaker v. State· Dissent†	808 P.2d 270	42
1991	Yearty v. State· Dissent†	805 P.2d 987	42
1995	Harmon v. State†	908 P.2d 434	38
1982	Marrone v. State· Concurrence†	653 P.2d 672	37
1987	Jones v. State†	744 P.2d 410	35
1984	Harris v. State†	678 P.2d 397	34
1982	Tazruk v. State†	655 P.2d 788	34
1981	Cano v. Municipality of Anchorage· Concurrence†	627 P.2d 660	34
1989	Hamilton v. State· Concurrence†	771 P.2d 1358	33
1983	Dyer v. State†	666 P.2d 438	33
1982	Cooley v. Municipality of Anchorage†	649 P.2d 251	33

Showing the 15 most-cited of 680 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 Alaska reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Robert G. Coats on?: Robert G. Coats was a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Alaska.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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