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 1961 / Served to 1975

Bernard S. Jefferson

Justice, California Court of Appeal

Bernard S. Jefferson was a Justice of the California Court of Appeal, who joined the court in 1961. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1961–1975 · 13 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1961	California Court of Appeal	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Jefferson authored 330 published opinions for the court (1961–1974), plus 2 dissents. Most cited: People v. Massengale (67 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. 58 of these were attributed to Jefferson 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
1970	People v. Massengale	10 Cal. App. 3d 689	67
1962	People v. Surplice	203 Cal. App. 2d 784	51
1963	People v. Finch	213 Cal. App. 2d 752	42
1967	People v. Molano	253 Cal. App. 2d 841	39
1962	People v. Ellhamer	199 Cal. App. 2d 777	35
1965	People v. Davis	233 Cal. App. 2d 156	29
1974	People v. Sobel	40 Cal. App. 3d 1046	28
1966	People v. Woods	239 Cal. App. 2d 697	28
1962	People v. Odegard	203 Cal. App. 2d 427	28
1967	Topanga Corp. v. Gentile	249 Cal. App. 2d 681	27
1965	People v. Aguilar	232 Cal. App. 2d 173	27
1965	People v. Powell	236 Cal. App. 2d 884	26
1964	People v. Zurica	225 Cal. App. 2d 25	26
1963	People v. Young	214 Cal. App. 2d 131	26
1964	People v. Kramer	227 Cal. App. 2d 199	25

Showing the 15 most-cited of 332 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 Bernard S. Jefferson on?: Bernard S. Jefferson 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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13 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).