How do judges of the California Court of Appeal reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.

California Court of Appeal / Joined 1956 / Served to 1963

Allen W. Ashburn

Justice, California Court of Appeal

Allen W. Ashburn was a Justice of the California Court of Appeal, who joined the court in 1956. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1956–1963 · 7 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1956	California Court of Appeal	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Ashburn authored 493 published opinions for the court (1955–1965), plus 8 dissents and 8 concurrences. Most cited: Ritchie v. Anchor Casualty Co. (98 citations).

Published, precedential opinions from the CourtListener corpus. Counts and rankings are objective and recomputable: how we count. We describe the record, not the judge. 56 of these were attributed to Ashburn by a unique court-, date-, and surname-match against our roster (marked ), because CourtListener recorded no author for them. Each links to the official text to verify. How we match.

Selected opinions

Year	Case	Citation	Cited
1955	Ritchie v. Anchor Casualty Co.	135 Cal. App. 2d 245	98
1958	Nevarov v. Caldwell	161 Cal. App. 2d 762	91
1959	People v. Murphy	173 Cal. App. 2d 367	76
1957	New v. New	148 Cal. App. 2d 372	75
1957	American Automobile Insurance v. Seaboard Surety Co.	155 Cal. App. 2d 192	72
1961	People v. Buono	191 Cal. App. 2d 203	67
1957	People v. Mills	306 P.2d 1005	66
1955	Hoel v. City of Los Angeles	136 Cal. App. 2d 295	66
1957	Osborne v. Security Insurance	155 Cal. App. 2d 201	58
1957	Munns v. Stenman	314 P.2d 67	58
1960	Campbell v. Magana	184 Cal. App. 2d 751	55
1960	Adler v. City Council	184 Cal. App. 2d 763	55
1959	Bisno v. Sax	175 Cal. App. 2d 714	53
1958	Grand v. Griesinger	160 Cal. App. 2d 397	52
1963	Magee v. Wyeth Laboratories, Inc.	214 Cal. App. 2d 340	48

Showing the 15 most-cited of 509 authored opinions in our data. “Cited” is inbound citations across the CourtListener corpus. Case links open the ruling’s full text (CourtListener) or its page here; read the methodology and verify against the primary source.

Questions & answers

How do judges of the California Court of Appeal reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Allen W. Ashburn on?: Allen W. Ashburn was a Justice of the California Court of Appeal.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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7 years on the California Court of Appeal. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).