The Arkansas Supreme Court is the highest court in the U.S. state of Arkansas. Since 1925, it has consisted of a Chief Justice and six Associate Justices, and at times Special Justices are called upon in the absence of a regular justice. The Justices are elected in a non-partisan election for eight-year-long terms that are staggered to make it unlikely that the entire court would be replaced in a single election. Any vacancy caused by a Justice not finishing his or her term is filled by an appointment made by the Governor of Arkansas.
The current Arkansas Supreme Court includes:
- Chief Justice James Hannah
- Associate Justice Donald L. Corbin
- Associate Justice Courtney Hudson Goodson
- Associate Justice Jim Gunter
- Associate Justice Paul Danielson
- Associate Justice Karen R. Baker
- Associate Justice Robert L. Brown
Under the state's first constitution, the Arkansas Supreme Court consisted of three judges including one Chief Justice, and all three of whom were elected by the Arkansas General Assembly. The first judges elected to the court by the Assembly were Daniel Ringo as Chief Justice (who served from 1836 to 1844), Townsend Dickinson (who served until 1842), and Thomas J. Lacy (whose term lasted until 1845).
No change to the court's size occurred after Reconstruction, but the Arkansas Constitution of 1874 was amended in 1924 (Amendment 9) to add two more judges and allow the Assembly to increase the number to seven, which it did a year later by Act 205 of 1925.
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“Henderson: What about Congress and the Supreme Court and the President? We got to pay them, don’t we?
Grandpa: Not with my money, no sir.”
—Robert Riskin (1897–1955)
“...I am who I am because I’m a black female.... When I was health director in Arkansas ... I could talk about teen-age pregnancy, about poverty, ignorance and enslavement and how the white power structure had imposed it—only because I was a black female. I mean, black people would have eaten up a white male who said what I did.”
—Joycelyn Elders (b. 1933)
“... beauty, like ecstasy, has always been hostile to the commonplace. And the commonplace, under its popular label of the normal, has been the supreme authority for Homo sapiens since the days when he was probably arboreal.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945)
“Of all things in life, Mrs. Lee held this kind of court-service in contempt, for she was something more than republican—a little communistic at heart, and her only serious complaint of the President and his wife was that they undertook to have a court and to ape monarchy. She had no notion of admitting social superiority in any one, President or Prince, and to be suddenly converted into a lady-in-waiting to a small German Grand-Duchess, was a terrible blow.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)