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 1980 / Served to 1981

Betty B. Deal

Associate Justice, California Court of Appeal

Betty B. Deal was an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal, who joined the court in 1980. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1980–1981 · 1 yr

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1980	California Court of Appeal	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Deal authored 1 published opinion for the court (1980). Most cited: People v. Hughes (33 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. 1 of these was attributed to Deal 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
1980	People v. Hughes†	112 Cal. App. 3d 452	33

Showing the 1 most-cited of 1 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 Betty B. Deal on?: Betty B. Deal was an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal.

Sources

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

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1 year 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).