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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Washington Supreme Court / Joined 1963 / Served to 1975

Frank Hale

Justice, Washington Supreme Court

Frank Hale was a Justice of the Washington Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1963. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1911 · age 115
Tenure: 1963–1975 · 11 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1963	Washington Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Hale authored 224 published opinions for the court (1963–1975), plus 71 dissents and 36 concurrences. Most cited: State Ex Rel. Carroll v. Junker (1,211 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. 131 of these were attributed to Hale 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
1971	State Ex Rel. Carroll v. Junker	482 P.2d 775	1,211
1969	Smith v. Skagit County	453 P.2d 832	164
1970	State v. Zornes· Concurrence†	475 P.2d 109	154
1974	Fritz v. Gorton· Concurrence†	517 P.2d 911	149
1973	National Bank v. Equity Investors	506 P.2d 20	145
1963	State Ex Rel. Washington State Finance Committee v. Martin	384 P.2d 833	138
1969	Washington Natural Gas Co. v. Public Utility District No. 1	459 P.2d 633	135
1972	Touchette v. Northwestern Mutual Insurance	494 P.2d 479	131
1967	City of Seattle v. Drew· Concurrence†	423 P.2d 522	124
1969	Ruth v. Dight	453 P.2d 631	121
1969	State v. Gefeller	458 P.2d 17	119
1973	State v. Patterson	515 P.2d 496	118
1972	State v. Frazier· Concurrence†	503 P.2d 1073	118
1975	State v. Lesnick· Dissent†	530 P.2d 243	107
1971	State v. Dixon	479 P.2d 931	99

Showing the 15 most-cited of 331 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 Washington Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Frank Hale on?: Frank Hale was a Justice of the Washington 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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11 years on the Washington Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).