One evaluation of his service on the state supreme court said:
A strong and sagacious man, with the authority which the position of chief justice always gives, would have been able to achieve a most enviable standing, laying the foundation of her jurisprudence broad and deep. Judge Ringo was not the man for this. Studying law in a clerk's office, his attention had been directed to the forms of pleas and entries, not to the broad principles of justice. For him a lawsuit was rather a means of settling nice points of special pleading than of adjusting the rights of parties. In his eyes, the forms of the law were an essential thing. During his whole official career his object was to seek out new refinements of pleading, and he impressed upon our jurisprudence a degree of technicality which it was never able to cast off until the adoption of the Code.[2]
Following his resignation from the federal bench, Ringo served as a Judge of the Confederate District Court for the Districts of Arkansas from 1862 to 1863. He resumed private practice in Little Rock from 1865 to 1873,[1] though "[i]n his later years he did little, for the adoption of the civil code had deprived him of his principal engine of legal warfare, the common-law pleading".[2] He died on September 3, 1873, in Little Rock.[1]