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 1937 / Served to 1942

Frederick W. Houser

Justice, Supreme Court of California

Frederick W. Houser was a Justice of the Supreme Court of California, who joined the court in 1937. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1871 · age 155
Tenure: 1937–1942 · 5 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1937	Supreme Court of California	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Houser authored 34 published opinions for the court (1924–1942), plus 14 dissents and 2 concurrences. Most cited: Rose v. State of California (382 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. 22 of these were attributed to Houser 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
1942	Rose v. State of California· Concurrence†	19 Cal. 2d 713	382
1925	Hatzakorzian v. Rucker-Fuller Desk Co.	239 P. 709	104
1924	People v. Ferdinand	229 P. 341	100
1939	Hamilton v. Pacific Electric Railway Co.	12 Cal. 2d 598	97
1938	People v. Wells	10 Cal. 2d 610	93
1939	People v. French· Dissent†	12 Cal. 2d 720	86
1938	Estate of Goldberg	10 Cal. 2d 709	72
1939	Klein v. Duchess Sandwich Co., Ltd.	14 Cal. 2d 272	69
1939	Rodman v. Superior Court	13 Cal. 2d 262	65
1939	People v. Adams	14 Cal. 2d 154	58
1940	People v. Lucas· Dissent†	16 Cal. 2d 178	57
1939	Evans v. Superior Court· Dissent†	14 Cal. 2d 563	56
1938	Zurich General Accident & Liability Insurance v. Kinsler†	12 Cal. 2d 98	56
1941	Elliott v. McCombs· Dissent†	17 Cal. 2d 23	52
1938	National Ice & Cold Storage Co. v. Pacific Fruit Express Co.†	11 Cal. 2d 283	46

Showing the 15 most-cited of 50 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. Houser on?: Frederick W. Houser 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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5 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).