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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Court of Appeals of Arkansas / Joined 1997 / Served to 2008

Sam Bird

Judge, Court of Appeals of Arkansas

Sam Bird was a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Arkansas, who joined the court in 1997. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1997–2008 · 11 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1997	Court of Appeals of Arkansas	–	–

Education

Florida State University
University of Arkansas

Judicial Record

In our data, Bird authored 246 published opinions for the court (1997–2008), plus 41 dissents and 24 concurrences. Most cited: Brewer v. Arkansas Department of Human Services (60 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. 155 of these were attributed to Bird 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
2001	Brewer v. Arkansas Department of Human Services	43 S.W.3d 196	60
2005	Hamilton v. Gregory Trucking	205 S.W.3d 181	31
2004	Smith v. City of Fort Smith· Concurrence†	143 S.W.3d 593	30
2000	Inge v. Walker	15 S.W.3d 348	30
2004	Robertson v. Lees	189 S.W.3d 463	28
2002	Van Curen v. Arkansas Professional Bail Bondsman Licensing Board	84 S.W.3d 47	27
2004	Cobbs v. Arkansas Department of Human Services	189 S.W.3d 487	26
2005	Turner v. Northwest Arkansas Neurosurgery Clinic, P.A.	210 S.W.3d 126	24
2002	Abshure v. State	87 S.W.3d 822	24
1998	Continental Express v. Harris	965 S.W.2d 811	24
1997	Hightower v. Newark Public School System	943 S.W.2d 608	24
2000	Rice v. Georgia-Pacific Corp.· Dissent†	35 S.W.3d 328	23
2007	Hamilton v. Allen	267 S.W.3d 627	21
2004	King v. Powell· Concurrence†	148 S.W.3d 792	21
2003	Bradford v. Director, Employment Security Department	128 S.W.3d 20	21

Showing the 15 most-cited of 311 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 Arkansas reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Sam Bird on?: Sam Bird was a Judge of the Court of Appeals 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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11 years on the Court of Appeals of Arkansas. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).