The Arkansas Supreme Court was created in 1836 and met for the first time on January 24, 1837. The Court established, as one of its early goals, a standard of fairness and speedy dispatch in its deliberations and opinion process.

For many years, the Court has operated with one of the nation’s heaviest per-judge appellate court workloads. The creation of the Court of Appeals in 1978 greatly eased the burden, but the number of cases continued to grow. The expansion of the Court of Appeals in 1996 and 1997 has greatly improved the administration of justice at the appellate court level. With slight revisions in the rules which divide cases between the Supreme Court and Court of Appeals, cases have been shifted from the Supreme Court to the Court of Appeals. This has decreased the per-judge average of the Supreme Court without increasing the per-judge average of the Court of Appeals. The Supreme Court’s historical dedication to its "fast track" system, where citizens are assured of a written opinion, on average, within two weeks of the time of submission, continues to be unique among state courts of last resort in the United States.

The workload of appellate courts is generally measured by the number of cases filed (including appeals, petitions, and motions) and disposed of during the year and by counting the number of majority opinions which were written by each justice. While the number of appeals from the trial courts increased in 1997-98, the number filed in the Supreme Court totaled 413, a decrease over the 1996-97 level of 562. The number of appeals, petitions, and motions filed was 875, a drop from 877 over the previous year. The Supreme Court has a good record for maintaining the currency of its cases. With the decrease in the number of filings, the Court was able to decrease the number of appeals pending at the end of the fiscal year from 315 in 1996-97 to 253 in 1997-98, a drop of about 20%. Justices also averaged writing and publishing over 54 majority opinions during the year.