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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Supreme Court of Arkansas / Joined 1985 / Served to 1998

William David Newbern

Justice, Supreme Court of Arkansas

William David Newbern was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Arkansas, who joined the court in 1985. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1937 · age 89
Tenure: 1985–1998 · 13 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1985	Supreme Court of Arkansas	–	–

Education

George Washington University

Judicial Record

In our data, Newbern authored 722 published opinions for the court (1985–1998), plus 110 dissents and 63 concurrences. Most cited: Finn v. McCuen (433 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. 548 of these were attributed to Newbern 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
1990	Finn v. McCuen	798 S.W.2d 34	433
1989	McCambridge v. City of Little Rock· Concurrence†	766 S.W.2d 909	247
1995	Bowen v. State	911 S.W.2d 555	109
1998	Lawhon Farm Services v. Brown†	335 Ark. 272	96
1998	Travis v. State	959 S.W.2d 32	85
1997	Wofford v. State	952 S.W.2d 646	83
1986	Liles v. Liles	711 S.W.2d 447	83
1991	Arnold v. Kemp· Concurrence†	813 S.W.2d 770	81
1985	Jim Halsey Co., Inc. v. Bonar· Dissent†	683 S.W.2d 898	77
1991	Walker v. State· Dissent†	803 S.W.2d 502	76
1997	Shannon v. Wilson· Dissent†	947 S.W.2d 349	74
1991	Crain Industries, Inc. v. Cass	810 S.W.2d 910	69
1997	Rankin v. State	948 S.W.2d 397	67
1998	Sturgis v. Skokos	977 S.W.2d 217	66
1987	Johnson v. State	732 S.W.2d 817	65

Showing the 15 most-cited of 895 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 Supreme Court of Arkansas reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was William David Newbern on?: William David Newbern was a Justice of the Supreme Court 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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13 years on the Supreme Court of Arkansas. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).