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

The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.

Supreme Court of Hawaii / Joined 1922 / Served to 1949

Emil C. Peters

Justice, Supreme Court of Hawaii

Emil C. Peters was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Hawaii, who joined the court in 1922. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1877 · age 149
Tenure: 1922–1949 · 27 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1922	Supreme Court of Hawaii	–	–

Education

Stanford University

Judicial Record

In our data, Peters authored 157 published opinions for the court (1922–1949), plus 23 dissents and 15 concurrences. Most cited: Territory v. Goto (35 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. 68 of these were attributed to Peters 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
1923	Territory v. Goto· Concurrence†	27 Haw. 65	35
1943	Estate Bernice P. Bishop· Dissent	36 Haw. 403	34
1940	Bishop v. Mahiko	35 Haw. 608	32
1946	Vasconcellos v. Juarez· Concurrence	37 Haw. 364	27
1939	Ulrich v. Security Investment Co.	35 Haw. 158	27
1947	Gabriel v. Margah	37 Haw. 571	22
1945	Territory v. Young and Nozawa	37 Haw. 189	21
1941	Land Title, Bishop Trust	35 Haw. 816	20
1936	County of Kauai v. McGonagle	33 Haw. 915	20
1938	Young v. Honolulu Construction & Draying Co.	34 Haw. 426	18
1939	Lalakea v. Laupahoehoe Sugar Co.	35 Haw. 262	17
1925	In Re the Estate of Isenberg· Dissent	28 Haw. 590	17
1922	Territory ex rel. Bailey v. Gay†	26 Haw. 382	17
1925	Territory v. Awana	28 Haw. 546	16
1940	Robinson v. McWayne	35 Haw. 689	15

Showing the 15 most-cited of 195 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 Hawaii reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.
Which court was Emil C. Peters on?: Emil C. Peters was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Hawaii.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

See something wrong? Report an error. Fixes are logged in the corrections log.

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