How do judges of the Colorado Supreme Court reach the bench?

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

Colorado Supreme Court / Joined 1983 / Served to 1997

Howard M. Kirshbaum

Justice, Colorado Supreme Court

Howard M. Kirshbaum was a Justice of the Colorado Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1983. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1938 · age 88
Tenure: 1983–1997 · 13 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1983	Colorado Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Harvard University

Judicial Record

In our data, Kirshbaum authored 282 published opinions for the court (1983–1997), plus 23 dissents and 22 concurrences. Most cited: People v. Rodriguez (1,618 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. 112 of these were attributed to Kirshbaum 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
1996	People v. Rodriguez· Concurrence†	914 P.2d 230	1,618
1992	Estate of Stevenson Ex Rel. Talovich v. Hollywood Bar & Cafe, Inc.	832 P.2d 718	1,035
1996	LAG v. People in Interest of AAG	912 P.2d 1385	698
1989	In Re the Marriage of Udis	780 P.2d 499	517
1995	Harris v. People	888 P.2d 259	423
1990	People v. Rodriguez· Dissent†	794 P.2d 965	410
1985	People v. Norman	703 P.2d 1261	394
1995	Brody v. Bock	897 P.2d 769	381
1995	Super Valu Stores, Inc. v. District Court in & for Weld County†	906 P.2d 72	352
1985	Travelers Insurance Co. v. Savio	706 P.2d 1258	315
1984	People v. Deadmond	683 P.2d 763	296
1988	People v. Drake	748 P.2d 1237	288
1991	Keller v. A.O. Smith Harvestore Products, Inc.	819 P.2d 69	261
1996	Colorado Permanente Medical Group, P.C. v. Evans· Concurrence†	926 P.2d 1218	248
1989	People v. Thompson	770 P.2d 1282	240

Showing the 15 most-cited of 327 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 Colorado Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Howard M. Kirshbaum on?: Howard M. Kirshbaum was a Justice of the Colorado Supreme Court.

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 Colorado Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).