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 1992 / Active

Sylvia Cooks

Judge, Louisiana Court of Appeal

Sylvia Cooks is a Judge of the Louisiana Court of Appeal, serving since 1992. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 1992 · 34 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1992	Louisiana Court of Appeal	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Cooks authored 716 published opinions for the court (1992–2019), plus 89 dissents and 24 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Smith (723 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. 468 of these were attributed to Cooks 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. Smith	846 So. 2d 786	723
2003	Amoco Production Co. v. Texaco, Inc.	838 So. 2d 821	43
2005	Vermilion Hosp., Inc. v. Patout	906 So. 2d 688	42
2005	State v. Theriot	893 So. 2d 1016	42
2007	LEJEUNE BROS. v. Goodrich Petroleum Co.	981 So. 2d 23	40
2006	State v. Davis	947 So. 2d 201	37
2007	State v. Mayeux	949 So. 2d 520	36
2002	Colonial Nursing Home v. Bradford	834 So. 2d 1262	34
2009	Simien v. Medical Protective Co.· Dissent†	11 So. 3d 1206	33
2004	Smith v. Roy O. Martin Lumber Co.	871 So. 2d 661	33
2010	Gunderson v. F.A. Richard & Associates· Separate†	44 So. 3d 779	31
2008	Nash v. AECOM TECHNOLOGY CORP.	976 So. 2d 263	30
1993	State v. Brown	627 So. 2d 192	28
2004	State v. Giles	884 So. 2d 1233	27
2003	Crain Brothers, Inc. v. Richard	842 So. 2d 523	27

Showing the 15 most-cited of 830 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 is Sylvia Cooks on?: Sylvia Cooks is 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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34 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).