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 1945 / Served to 1964

Homer R. Spence

Justice, Supreme Court of California

Homer R. Spence was a Justice of the Supreme Court of California, who joined the court in 1945. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1891 · age 135
Tenure: 1945–1964 · 19 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1945	Supreme Court of California	–	–

Education

University of California-Berkeley

Judicial Record

In our data, Spence authored 339 published opinions for the court (1933–1960), plus 58 dissents and 32 concurrences. Most cited: People v. Watson (7,961 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. 118 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
1956	People v. Watson	299 P.2d 243	7,961
1955	People v. Cahan· Dissent†	282 P.2d 905	640
1959	Select Base Materials, Inc. v. Board of Equalization	51 Cal. 2d 640	513
1956	Badillo v. Superior Court· Dissent†	46 Cal. 2d 269	357
1945	Hobart v. Hobart Estate Co.· Concurrence†	26 Cal. 2d 412	327
1946	People v. Valentine· Concurrence†	28 Cal. 2d 121	325
1951	People v. Carmen· Concurrence†	36 Cal. 2d 768	319
1958	People v. Wein	326 P.2d 457	311
1957	People v. Carter· Concurrence†	48 Cal. 2d 737	300
1956	People v. Winston	46 Cal. 2d 151	242
1957	County of Los Angeles v. Faus· Dissent†	48 Cal. 2d 672	221
1958	Butigan v. Yellow Cab Co.· Dissent†	320 P.2d 500	218
1954	Richards v. Stanley· Dissent†	43 Cal. 2d 60	218
1947	Berniker v. Berniker	30 Cal. 2d 439	197
1959	MacLeod v. Tribune Publishing Co.· Dissent†	343 P.2d 36	182

Showing the 15 most-cited of 429 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 Homer R. Spence on?: Homer R. Spence 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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19 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).