How do judges of the Court of Appeals of Washington reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Court of Appeals of Washington / Joined 1993 / Served to 2010

Elaine Houghton

Judge, Court of Appeals of Washington

Elaine Houghton was a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Washington, who joined the court in 1993. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1993–2010 · 17 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1993	Court of Appeals of Washington	–	–

Education

University of Washington-Seattle Campus

Judicial Record

In our data, Houghton authored 499 published opinions for the court (1993–2010), plus 8 dissents and 6 concurrences. Most cited: In Re the Marriage of Crosetto (164 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. 283 of these were attributed to Houghton 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
1996	In Re the Marriage of Crosetto	918 P.2d 954	164
2005	State v. Stevenson	114 P.3d 699	95
2005	State v. Stevenson†	128 Wash. App. 179	93
2002	State v. Jennings	44 P.3d 1	88
2003	State v. Hughes†	118 Wash. App. 713	77
1996	State v. Hahn	924 P.2d 392	77
2003	State v. Hughes	77 P.3d 681	76
1996	Dombrosky v. Farmers Insurance†	84 Wash. App. 245	64
1996	Johnson v. Department of Social & Health Services†	80 Wash. App. 212	60
2007	State v. BJS	169 P.3d 34	56
2007	State v. Ague-Masters	156 P.3d 265	56
2007	State v. Ague-Masters†	138 Wash. App. 86	56
2006	Cingular Wireless, LLC v. Thurston County†	131 Wash. App. 756	56
2007	State v. B.J.S.†	140 Wash. App. 91	55
1995	State v. Bilal	893 P.2d 674	51

Showing the 15 most-cited of 513 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 Court of Appeals of Washington reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Elaine Houghton on?: Elaine Houghton was a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Washington.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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