Morris "Buzz" Arnold

Morris Sheppard "Buzz" Arnold is a senior judge on the Eighth District U.S. Court of Appeals. Arnold was appointed by President G.H.W. Bush in 1992. Arnold's brother Richard S. Arnold served alongside him on the Eighth District bench until he passed away in 2004.

Arnold was born in Texarkana, Texas, in 1941. He graduated from New Hampshire's Phillips Exeter Academy in 1959. He received an electrical engineering degree from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville in 1965. He received his LLB degree from the School of Law in Fayetteville in 1968. Arnold attended Harvard University after graduating law school in Arkansas, receiving his LLM in 1969 and LLD in 1971.

Arnold practiced law in Texarkana for a short time before accepting a post as professor of law at Indiana University in 1971. In 1977 he accepted the vice presidency of the University of Pennsylvania Law School. In 1981 he was named professor of law at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, where he taught and practiced law before returning to the University of Pennsylvania in 1984. Over the next two years he rotated rapidly from Pennsylvania, to Stanford University Law School, to Indiana University Law School. In the 1980s Arnold also served as special chief justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court, special master to the Pulaski County Chancery Court, and chairman of the Arkansas Republican Party.

In 1985 Arnold was appointed by President Reagan to a seat on the bench of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Arkansas. In 1992 he became justice to the Eighth District U.S. Court of Appeals based in St. Louis.