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 2000 / Served to 2015

Dennis Allison Cornell

Associate Justice, California Court of Appeal

Dennis Allison Cornell was an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal (89 judges, selected by merit selection with retention), who joined the court in 2000. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 2000–2015 · 14 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2000	California Court of Appeal	–	–

Education

Stanford University		1969
George Washington University	honors	1972

Judicial Record

In our data, Cornell authored 60 published opinions for the court (1994–2014), plus 2 concurrences. Most cited: People v. Patino (169 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. 19 of these were attributed to Cornell 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
1994	People v. Patino	26 Cal. App. 4th 1737	169
2002	People v. Killebrew	126 Cal. Rptr. 2d 876	168
2009	People v. Ramon	175 Cal. App. 4th 843	165
2010	In Re Marriage of Tharp	188 Cal. App. 4th 1295	130
2010	People v. Soojian†	190 Cal. App. 4th 491	114
2003	Genesis Environmental Services v. San Joaquin Valley Unified Air Pollution Control District	6 Cal. Rptr. 3d 574	34
2007	CHABAK v. Monroy	65 Cal. Rptr. 3d 641	29
2007	NMSBPCSLDHB v. County of Fresno	61 Cal. Rptr. 3d 425	28
2004	People v. Hester	14 Cal. Rptr. 3d 377	28
2001	Telles Transport, Inc. v. Workers' Compensation Appeals Board	112 Cal. Rptr. 2d 540	27
2014	People v. Tubbs†	230 Cal. App. 4th 578	24
2001	Morton Engineering & Construction, Inc. v. Patscheck	104 Cal. Rptr. 2d 815	23
2012	People v. Lopez†	208 Cal. App. 4th 1049	22
2003	People v. Magee	131 Cal. Rptr. 2d 834	21
2012	People v. Velasquez†	211 Cal. App. 4th 1170	20

Showing the 15 most-cited of 62 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 Dennis Allison Cornell on?: Dennis Allison Cornell was an Associate 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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14 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).