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

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

Colorado Supreme Court / Joined 1967 / Served to 1979

Donald E. Kelley

Justice, Colorado Supreme Court

Donald E. Kelley was a Justice of the Colorado Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1967. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1908–1995
Tenure: 1967–1979 · 12 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1967	Colorado Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Kelley authored 499 published opinions for the court (1967–1979), plus 24 dissents and 9 concurrences. Most cited: Mingo v. People (193 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. 242 of these were attributed to Kelley 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	Mingo v. People	468 P.2d 849	193
1976	People Ex Rel. VanMeveren v. COUNTY COURT, ETC.	551 P.2d 716	182
1971	Mile High Fence Co. v. Radovich†	175 Colo. 537	118
1968	People v. District Court for County of Jefferson· Dissent†	439 P.2d 741	114
1970	Owens v. Brochner	474 P.2d 603	90
1975	Hunter v. District Ct. in & for Twentieth Jud. Dist.	543 P.2d 1265	74
1970	Broncucia v. McGee	475 P.2d 336	73
1976	A,B,C,D,E,F,G, & H v. District Court of the Second Judicial District	550 P.2d 315	67
1975	Snyder v. City of Lakewood†	189 Colo. 421	67
1975	Fry v. Ball	544 P.2d 402	66
1974	People v. Thomas	525 P.2d 1136	66
1975	Antonopoulos v. Town of Telluride	532 P.2d 346	64
1969	People v. McKenzie	458 P.2d 232	63
1978	Fritz v. Regents of the University of Colorado	586 P.2d 23	62
1971	Evans v. Board of County Commissioners· Dissent†	174 Colo. 97	60

Showing the 15 most-cited of 532 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 Colorado Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Donald E. Kelley on?: Donald E. Kelley was a Justice of the Colorado 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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12 years on the Colorado Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).