The Honorable Scott Bales (ret.) was appointed to the Arizona Supreme Court in 2005. He served on the court for fourteen years, including as Chief Justice from July 2014 through July 2019. As a member of the Conference of Chief Justices, he served on its Board of Directors, chaired its Education Committee, and was a member of the Amicus Brief Review Team. Justice Bales also chaired the Appellate Judges Conference of the ABA’s Judicial Division and the ABA’s Council for the Section on Legal Education. He is a member of the Council of the American Law Institute and the Board of Trustees for the National Conference of Bar Examiners.
Following law school, Bales was law clerk for the Office of the Solicitor General in 1983. He went on to clerk for Joseph T. Sneed III of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. From 1984 to 1985 he was a clerk for Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor of the United States Supreme Court.
Before taking the bench, Chief Justice Bales practiced law for nearly twenty years as a private and public lawyer. He was a partner in Phoenix firms that later became Osborn Maledon P.A. and Lewis Roca. He was Arizona’s Solicitor General from 1999-2001, and he served as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Policy Development, a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Phoenix, and a Special Investigative Counsel for the Justice Department’s Inspector General.
In 2018, he was named by the American Judges Association as the that year's recipient of the Chief Justice Richard W. Holmes Award of Merit, which recognizes "outstanding contributions to the judiciary." Bales also received the 2018 Ernest C. Friesen Award of Excellence, presented annually by the Justice Management Institute to an individual who has demonstrated vision, leadership, and sustained commitment to the achievement of excellence in the administration of justice.
He spent two and a half years as Chairperson of the Judicial Vetting Commission for the Republic of Moldova, established to strengthen the nation’s justice system and support its path toward European membership.
Justice Bales now serves as a neutral, including arbitrations and mediations, and consulting on appeals and internal investigations.