Justices Battle for Control of the Arkansas Supreme Court

The Arkansas Supreme Court is engaged in a public power struggle over who has the ultimate authority to make administrative decisions for the institution — a constitutional confrontation pitting the state’s newly elected chief justice against the majority of her colleagues.

Minutes after taking the oath of office at midnight on New Year’s Day, Chief Justice Karen Baker replaced three members of the state judicial discipline and disability commission, which is handling several complaints against her and other members of the court. Within two days, she had fired 10 staffers from the administrative office of the courts, including the agency’s director. Five of Baker’s colleagues hit back almost immediately, issuing two orders to overturn her decisions and reinstate the employees and commission members.

Baker, the justices said, overstepped her constitutional and statutory authority. They asserted that under the state constitution, the entire court must be consulted — and a majority must agree — on decisions such as hiring and firing. Baker has responded with her own order that the chief justice is vested by the state constitution with the authority to administer the court, which means she has every right to make decisions about employees and appointments.

The turmoil in Arkansas has been building since last summer. Controversial cases, sharp dissents, and a series of highly publicized incidents involving staff — including a lawsuit brought by one of the justices — have ratcheted up the tension. Since last August, six of seven current members of the Arkansas Supreme Court have been referred to the state’s judicial discipline commission for investigation, all by their fellow justices or employees of the court. (The seventh justice is new to the court.)

Now Baker and a majority of her colleagues are in a standoff that appears likely to end in litigation or intervention by the state legislature.

“You would hope that the state supreme court would remain at the apex of people’s confidence in the institutions of government, and this isn’t helping that at all,” said John DiPippa, professor of law and public policy and dean emeritus of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock School of Law.

Conflict in State High Courts

Arkansas is not the only state where supreme court justices have been embroiled in recent public battles. In August 2023, one day after capturing a majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, liberal justices voted to fire the director of their state court system, a move that the court’s conservative chief justice called “reckless” and “shameful.”

In 2023, North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls was the target of an ethics investigation by the state’s judicial standards commission for expressing concern to a journalist about the lack of diversity on the state’s bench. Earls sued in federal court, claiming that the commission had violated her First Amendment rights. She dropped the case in early 2024 after the commission closed the investigation.

While ideology and partisanship have triggered conflict at high courts in states like Wisconsin and North Carolina, Arkansas would seem an unlikely venue for such battles. During the last 15 years, the state has shifted from Democratic to a Republican stronghold, said John Clark Davis, a political scientist and executive director of the Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History, who has charted the state’s political transformation. Even so, the state’s judicial races are nonpartisan and attract little attention from voters, which makes it “difficult to say” how the state’s broader partisan shift has directly impacted judicial contests, Davis said.

Arkansas’s Republican governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, has worked to clarify matters. In December, she appointed Nicholas Bronni, the state’s solicitor general, and reappointed Cody Hiland, a former U.S. attorney and chair of the Arkansas Republican Party, to fill vacancies on the court. “These two appointees cement our conservative supreme court majority,” Sanders said. This majority also includes justices Rhonda Wood, Barbara Webb, and Shawn Womack. Together, they have voted as a bloc on administrative issues, with justices Baker and Courtney Rae Hudson opposing them or not participating in the decision-making process.

The Contest for Chief

The struggles over control of the court come in the wake of a tight race for chief justice. Arkansas is one of a handful of states where the position of chief justice is chosen by voters. Of the four candidates who ran to succeed retiring Chief Justice John Dan Kemp in 2024, three were sitting justices. After an achingly close primary, Baker and Wood advanced to a November runoff.

Wood won the support of the state’s Republican establishment and outspent Baker by a factor of 10 to 1. Baker’s Election Day defeat of Wood surprised many political observers. Baker is the first woman elected chief justice of Arkansas.

Baker and Wood sparred in decisions as well. In August, for instance, the justices voted 4–3 to uphold a decision by the secretary of state that effectively killed an abortion rights measure slated for the November ballot. Wood authored the majority opinion, and Baker penned a blistering dissent. “Why are the [secretary of state] and the majority determined to keep this particular vote from the people?” Baker wrote.

In an interview, Wood said the race for chief justice has played “no role at all” in the dispute over the court’s administration. “There were no negative ads, and we weren’t attacking each other,” Wood said.

Who Runs the Court?

As a legal matter, the dispute in Arkansas centers on language in Amendment 80, Section 4, of the state constitution: “The Supreme Court shall exercise general superintending control over all courts of the state and may temporarily assign judges, with their consent, to courts or divisions other than that for which they were elected or appointed. These functions shall be administered by the chief justice.”

Baker, in a January 8 order, contended that “Amendment 80 does not limit the chief justice’s authority in such a way, nor was it intended to.” Instead, she said, “it is my constitutional duty to the people of Arkansas to administer the functions of the court, and I will not yield any power that was bestowed upon any chief justice before me.” Several associate justices argue that the clause limits Baker’s powers to temporary judge assignments and routine matters, such as closing the court for a snow day.

To bolster her argument, Baker cited a 2017 memo written by Kemp, the previous chief justice, rejecting a justice’s proposal that the court make administrative decisions by a majority vote, saying those matters were the purview of the chief justice. (Wood acknowledges Kemp considered taking on more authority but contends Kemp later acted on administrative matters with support from a majority of justices.)

“The original sin here was the former chief justice’s memo,” DiPippa said. “He laid down absolute control over administrative matters.” To the extent Baker is relying on that, he added, it’s a reasonable position. Nonetheless, DiPippa said he does not think the chief justice has been “entirely clear about how far she thinks her power goes.”

A New Contract

The chief justice may not be the only member of the court broadly interpreting their powers. In December — just before Baker became chief justice — five members of the court negotiated a new, eight-year contract with Marty Sullivan, director of the Arkansas Administrative Office of the Courts, whose contract had been set to expire in March. Baker’s term is also eight years, so she likely wouldn’t have the opportunity to nominate a new director, who is responsible for both long-term strategic planning and day-to-day operations of the courts. The move, Wood said, was designed to prevent a valued employee from leaving the court.

DiPippa notes that under the Arkansas Code, the director “shall be nominated by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court subject to the approval” of the state judiciary and “shall hold office at the pleasure of the Supreme Court.”

“I don’t know that this means a majority of the court can simply decide they’re going to keep you in office and extend your contract another eight years,” said DiPippa, who knows the justices and taught three of the court’s current members in law school.

Fights on Multiple Fronts

Clashes between the justices have become public on multiple occasions.

In August, prior to Baker’s election to chief, local news outlet Arkansas Business, looking into a staff exodus from the state office that oversees attorney discipline, filed a Freedom of Information Act request for emails of certain court officials, including sitting justice Hudson. That request spurred a chain of events that included five justices (not Hudson or Baker) agreeing in part to the request, followed by Hudson obtaining a temporary stay to prevent release of the emails.

In an unsigned opinion, the five justices vacated the injunction and referred Hudson and her attorney to the state’s disciplinary bodies for potential ethics violations. Baker, in a callback to her dissent in the abortion ballot measure case, scoffed that the majority had again “chosen to liberate itself from the shackles of our longstanding precedent . . . in order to reach a particular result.” She also referred the five majority justices to the judicial discipline commission — the same commission she would target with firings a few months later. (Hudson eventually released the requested emails. “There wasn’t a whole lot there,” Arkansas Business wrote.)

An early December visit by Baker and Hudson to the administrative office of the courts also went awry. Baker headed to director Sullivan’s office for a tour of the recently expanded building and, finding Sullivan gone, entered his unlocked office. She later told local media that she was looking at architectural plans leaning against a wall in the office. The visit — and a subsequent one where she was denied entry to Sullivan’s locked office — resulted in employees filing complaints with the administrative office’s human resources department and Baker becoming the subject of an inquiry by the judicial disciplinary commission. That investigation may provide insight about her desire to replace its members. Baker contends that one of the judges on the commission is biased against her.

“I viewed this issue as fairly ridiculous then, and I still do,” Baker said in an interview. “But everything flowed from that incident.”

The ill will escalated after Baker’s January 1 swearing-in ceremony, when the firings that are the focus of the current dispute occurred. First, Baker replaced members of the judicial discipline commission. She then confronted Sullivan and the supreme court’s police chief about their handling of Freedom of Information Act requests involving her. On January 3, she fired them and eight others. The resulting dispute involved five justices claiming the firings were retaliatory and issuing orders reinstating the employees and commission members. Baker maintained that Sullivan’s rehiring was illegal.

During the court’s January 23 business conference, the majority voted again to ratify their previous orders. Reached after the meeting, Baker reiterated her position. “Things are not settled,” Baker said. “The legislature may decide to clarify. And this may end in litigation. I’m not sure which way it’s going to go.”

More to Come

Meanwhile, the public rancor continues. During a January 30 appearance at a legislative hearing, Baker acknowledged the supreme court has not issued any decisions since early December. She attributed the delay, in part, to Bronni, saying he has recused himself in every criminal case before the court because of his previous role as solicitor general. Bronni responded the next day with a letter to the committee denying Baker’s claims and saying that “the court continues to move forward in criminal cases with my participation.”

“For the past several months, Arkansans have been witnessing a level of dysfunction from their state supreme court, the likes of which no living person has seen before,” Davis, the political scientist, said. Local media outlets have reported on the disputes and legislators are beginning to raise questions. “The drama is beginning to draw more attention and could lead to a decline in public confidence in the court if left unattended,” Davis added.

For her part, Wood stressed that the disputes over administrative matters are not affecting deliberations over decisions but noted that “I do think that we have to find ways as a court to reinstill the public’s faith in us and reassure them.”

Baker is more sanguine. “I don’t think the public expects us to get along and sing from the same songbook. That’s never been the job,” Baker said. “The court has frequently had disagreements to the point of constitutional crisis — and we’ll see if that happens again.”

David Brown is a freelance writer and former editor-in-chief of American Lawyer Media, The National Law Journal, and Legal Times.

Suggested Citation: David Brown, Justices Battle for Control of the Arkansas Supreme Court, Sᴛᴀᴛᴇ Cᴏᴜʀᴛ Rᴇᴘᴏʀᴛ (Feb. 18, 2025), https://statecourtreport.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/justices-battle-control-arkansas-supreme-court