How do judges of the California Court of Appeal reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.

California Court of Appeal / Joined 1972 / Served to 1992

Herbert L. Ashby

Associate Justice, California Court of Appeal

Herbert L. Ashby was an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal, who joined the court in 1972. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1972–1992 · 20 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1972	California Court of Appeal	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Ashby authored 470 published opinions for the court (1972–1992), plus 11 dissents and 7 concurrences. Most cited: People v. Superior Court (Du) (137 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. 87 of these were attributed to Ashby 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
1992	People v. Superior Court (Du)	5 Cal. App. 4th 822	137
1986	People v. Hill	185 Cal. App. 3d 831	132
1988	In Re Matthew S.	201 Cal. App. 3d 315	103
1976	Melnyk v. Robledo	64 Cal. App. 3d 618	82
1975	Val's Painting & Drywall, Inc. v. Allstate Insurance	53 Cal. App. 3d 576	79
1977	Imig v. Ferrar	70 Cal. App. 3d 48	67
1979	People v. Benton	100 Cal. App. 3d 92	66
1980	PAMELA L. v. Farmer	112 Cal. App. 3d 206	64
1987	People v. Porter	194 Cal. App. 3d 34	61
1983	Berge v. International Harvester Co.	142 Cal. App. 3d 152	54
1975	In Re Marriage of Kuppinger	48 Cal. App. 3d 628	54
1983	People v. Gonzalez	141 Cal. App. 3d 786	53
1981	Dominguez v. City of Alhambra	118 Cal. App. 3d 237	52
1982	People v. Packard	131 Cal. App. 3d 622	50
1990	People v. Murray	225 Cal. App. 3d 734	46

Showing the 15 most-cited of 488 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 California Court of Appeal reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Herbert L. Ashby on?: Herbert L. Ashby was an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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