How do judges of the Washington Supreme Court reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Washington Supreme Court / Joined 1985 / Served to 1999

Barbara Durham

Justice, Washington Supreme Court

Barbara Durham was a Justice of the Washington Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1985. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1942–2002
Tenure: 1985–1999 · 14 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1985	Washington Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Georgetown University
Stanford University

Judicial Record

In our data, Durham authored 212 published opinions for the court (1985–2003), plus 51 dissents and 41 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Scott (576 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. 123 of these were attributed to Durham 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
1988	State v. Scott	757 P.2d 492	576
1995	State v. Pirtle· Concurrence†	127 Wash. 2d 628	557
1992	State v. Lord	822 P.2d 177	447
1993	Matter of Personal Restraint of Young	857 P.2d 989	407
1990	City of Spokane v. Douglass	795 P.2d 693	388
1995	State v. Brett· Concurrence†	892 P.2d 29	373
1994	Progressive Animal Welfare Society v. University of Washington†	125 Wash. 2d 243	373
1992	Matter of Personal Restraint of Rice	828 P.2d 1086	355
1994	Matter of Personal Restraint of Lord	868 P.2d 835	352
1988	State v. Dunaway	743 P.2d 1237	328
1990	ATHERTON CONDO APARTMENT-OWNERS ASS'N BD OF DIRECTORS v. Blume Dev. Co.	799 P.2d 250	311
1989	Sofie v. Fibreboard Corp.· Dissent†	780 P.2d 260	308
1989	LaMon v. Butler	770 P.2d 1027	305
1993	State v. Benn· Concurrence†	845 P.2d 289	303
1986	State v. Stroud· Concurrence†	720 P.2d 436	292

Showing the 15 most-cited of 304 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 Washington Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Barbara Durham on?: Barbara Durham was a Justice of the Washington Supreme Court.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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