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

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

Supreme Court of California / Joined 1970 / Served to 1977

Donald R. Wright

Chief Justice, Supreme Court of California

Donald R. Wright was a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of California, who joined the court in 1970. He previously served on the Municipal Court of California, County of Los Angeles, Superior Court of California, County of Los Angeles and California Court of Appeal. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1907–1985
Tenure: 1970–1977 · 7 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1970	Supreme Court of California	–	–
1953	Municipal Court of California, County of Los Angeles	–	–
1961	Superior Court of California, County of Los Angeles	–	–
1968	California Court of Appeal	–	–
1970	Supreme Court of California	–	–

Education

Stanford University
Harvard University

Judicial Record

In our data, Wright authored 186 published opinions for the court (1970–1977), plus 2 dissents and 15 concurrences. Most cited: People v. Sedeno (776 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. 33 of these were attributed to Wright 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
1974	People v. Sedeno	518 P.2d 913	776
1973	People v. Beamon	504 P.2d 905	538
1972	People v. Beagle	492 P.2d 1	532
1974	Bertero v. National General Corp.	529 P.2d 608	472
1976	Goodman v. Kennedy	556 P.2d 737	448
1977	Ray v. Alad Corp.	560 P.2d 3	396
1977	People v. Windham	560 P.2d 1187	383
1972	People v. Anderson	493 P.2d 880	382
1976	People v. Duran	545 P.2d 1322	373
1976	People v. Olivas	551 P.2d 375	349
1971	Vesely v. Sager	486 P.2d 151	349
1977	People v. DeVaughn	558 P.2d 872	342
1974	In Re Yurko	519 P.2d 561	335
1974	People v. Hill	528 P.2d 1	329
1976	Birkenfeld v. City of Berkeley	550 P.2d 1001	294

Showing the 15 most-cited of 203 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 Supreme Court of California reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Donald R. Wright on?: Donald R. Wright was a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of California.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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