How do judges of the Louisiana Court of Appeal reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Louisiana Court of Appeal / Joined 1986 / Served to 2005

Sol Gothard

Judge, Louisiana Court of Appeal

Sol Gothard was a Judge of the Louisiana Court of Appeal, who joined the court in 1986. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1986–2005 · 19 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1986	Louisiana Court of Appeal	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Gothard authored 651 published opinions for the court (1986–2005), plus 3 dissents and 5 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Farhood (195 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. 286 of these were attributed to Gothard 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
2003	State v. Farhood	844 So. 2d 217	195
2004	State v. Taylor	887 So. 2d 589	85
1997	State v. Styles	692 So. 2d 1222	63
2005	State v. Dixon	900 So. 2d 929	55
2001	State v. Kempton	806 So. 2d 718	55
1998	State v. Rainey	722 So. 2d 1097	42
1997	Rowley v. Loupe	694 So. 2d 1006	39
1996	State v. Meyers	683 So. 2d 1378	38
2004	State v. Lathers	868 So. 2d 881	37
2001	State v. Taylor	802 So. 2d 779	36
2001	State v. Davis	792 So. 2d 126	34
2001	State v. Temple	806 So. 2d 697	33
1990	State v. Burrow	565 So. 2d 972	33
2004	State v. Merritt	877 So. 2d 1079	32
2002	State v. Fletcher	836 So. 2d 557	31

Showing the 15 most-cited of 659 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 Louisiana Court of Appeal reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court was Sol Gothard on?: Sol Gothard was a Judge of the Louisiana Court of Appeal.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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