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 1895 / Served to 1918

Frederick W. Henshaw

Justice, Supreme Court of California

Frederick W. Henshaw was a Justice of the Supreme Court of California, who joined the court in 1895. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1858 · age 168
Tenure: 1895–1918 · 23 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1895	Supreme Court of California	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Henshaw authored 1,060 published opinions for the court (1895–1917), plus 20 dissents and 37 concurrences. Most cited: Zibbell v. Southern Pacific Co. (247 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. 237 of these were attributed to Henshaw 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
1911	Zibbell v. Southern Pacific Co.	116 P. 513	247
1911	Davis v. Hearst	116 P. 530	214
1897	People v. Durrant†	116 Cal. 179	204
1915	Western Indemnity Co. v. Pillsbury· Dissent	151 P. 398	159
1913	Pacific Telephone Etc. Co. v. Eshleman	137 P. 1119	150
1916	Western Metal Supply Co. v. Pillsbury· Dissent	156 P. 491	144
1911	People v. Coffey	119 P. 901	139
1896	Owens v. McNally†	113 Cal. 444	129
1899	Berka v. Woodward†	125 Cal. 119	117
1895	In re Estate of Walkerly†	108 Cal. 627	115
1917	Gray v. Reclamation District No. 1500	163 P. 1024	113
1905	Chase v. Trout· Dissent	80 P. 81	109
1908	Bradley v. Rosenthal	97 P. 875	108
1896	McBean v. City of Fresno†	112 Cal. 159	107
1915	In Re Estate of Baker	150 P. 989	103

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,126 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 Frederick W. Henshaw on?: Frederick W. Henshaw was a 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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23 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).