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 2001 / Active

Steele Hays

Judge, Court of Appeals of Arkansas

Steele Hays is a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Arkansas, serving since 2001. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2001 · 24 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2001	Court of Appeals of Arkansas	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Hays authored 12 published opinions for the court (1979–2001), plus 1 dissent. Most cited: Gustafson v. State (20 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. 2 of these were attributed to Hays 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	Gustafson v. State	593 S.W.2d 187	20
1980	Harris v. State	606 S.W.2d 93	17
1979	Gregory v. Moose	590 S.W.2d 665	17
1980	Roy v. International Multifoods Corp.	597 S.W.2d 129	16
1979	Rice v. McKinley	590 S.W.2d 305	14
1980	Brown v. Aquilino	608 S.W.2d 35	13
1980	Bussey v. Bank of Malvern	603 S.W.2d 426	13
1980	Morgan v. Robertson	609 S.W.2d 662	10
1980	National Investors Life & Casualty Insurance v. Arrowood	606 S.W.2d 97	9
1980	Smith v. State	594 S.W.2d 255	9
1980	Baldwin v. Club Products Co.	604 S.W.2d 568	8
2001	Willis v. State†	76 Ark. App. 81	4
2001	Proctor v. State· Dissent†	76 Ark. App. 48	2

Showing the 13 most-cited of 13 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 is Steele Hays on?: Steele Hays is 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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24 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).