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 1980 / Served to 1993

Herman Lum

Justice, Supreme Court of Hawaii

Herman Lum was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Hawaii, who joined the court in 1980. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1927–2009
Tenure: 1980–1993 · 13 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1980	Supreme Court of Hawaii	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Lum authored 199 published opinions for the court (1980–1995), plus 6 dissents. Most cited: State v. Kelekolio (204 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. 180 of these were attributed to Lum 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
1993	State v. Kelekolio	849 P.2d 58	204
1989	Masaki v. General Motors Corp.†	780 P.2d 566	188
1989	State v. Pinero	778 P.2d 704	121
1989	Sandy Beach Defense Fund v. City Council†	773 P.2d 250	114
1992	Larsen v. Pacesetter Systems, Inc.†	837 P.2d 1273	110
1993	Kernan v. Tanaka	856 P.2d 1207	93
1981	State v. Estencion†	625 P.2d 1040	92
1990	State v. Matafeo†	787 P.2d 671	81
1981	Chung v. Animal Clinic, Inc.†	636 P.2d 721	77
1980	Wong v. Bd. of Regents, University of Hawaii†	616 P.2d 201	75
1986	State v. Marsh†	728 P.2d 1301	69
1993	State v. Pinero	859 P.2d 1369	66
1980	Ai v. Frank Huff Agency, Ltd.†	607 P.2d 1304	64
1993	State v. Valera†	848 P.2d 376	60
1983	Wong v. City and County of Honolulu†	665 P.2d 157	60

Showing the 15 most-cited of 205 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 Herman Lum on?: Herman Lum 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

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13 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).