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 1930 / Served to 1960

Homer R. Spence

Justice, California Court of Appeal

Homer R. Spence was a Justice of the California Court of Appeal, who joined the court in 1930. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1930–1960 · 30 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1930	California Court of Appeal	–	–

Education

Stanford University

Judicial Record

In our data, Spence authored 560 published opinions for the court (1928–1944), plus 7 dissents and 2 concurrences. Most cited: Christal v. Police Commission (85 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. 135 of these were attributed to Spence 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
1939	Christal v. Police Commission	33 Cal. App. 2d 564	85
1932	People v. Raleigh	16 P.2d 752	71
1934	Poncino v. Reid-Murdock & Co.	28 P.2d 932	56
1933	Joint Highway District No. 9 v. Ocean Shore Railroad	18 P.2d 413	47
1935	Hunsinger v. Landgren	9 Cal. App. 2d 374	40
1942	Johnson v. Sacramento Northern Railway	54 Cal. App. 2d 528	38
1943	Pennix v. Winton	61 Cal. App. 2d 761	34
1935	Smith v. Bank of California, National Ass'n	4 Cal. App. 2d 548	34
1941	Estate of Tibbetts	48 Cal. App. 2d 177	33
1935	Haydel v. Morton	8 Cal. App. 2d 730	33
1944	Becker v. Becker	64 Cal. App. 2d 239	30
1941	Horsman v. Maden	48 Cal. App. 2d 635	30
1932	Estate of Sill	9 P.2d 243	30
1940	Yoshiko Yamauchi v. O'Neill	38 Cal. App. 2d 703	29
1939	Useldinger v. Britt	35 Cal. App. 2d 723	28

Showing the 15 most-cited of 569 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 Homer R. Spence on?: Homer R. Spence was a 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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30 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).