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 1985 / Served to 2006

J Gary Hastings

Justice, California Court of Appeal

J Gary Hastings was a Justice of the California Court of Appeal, who joined the court in 1985. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1985–2006 · 20 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1985	California Court of Appeal	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Hastings authored 149 published opinions for the court (1994–2006), plus 1 dissent. Most cited: Hernandez v. California Hospital Medical Center (226 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. 14 of these were attributed to Hastings 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
2000	Hernandez v. California Hospital Medical Center	93 Cal. Rptr. 2d 97	226
2005	Boeken v. Philip Morris Inc.	26 Cal. Rptr. 3d 638	192
2003	Los Angeles County Department of Children & Family Services v. Alvin R.	134 Cal. Rptr. 2d 210	173
1997	Kurinij v. Hanna & Morton	55 Cal. App. 4th 853	113
1995	People v. Green	34 Cal. App. 4th 165	97
2003	Jespersen v. Zubiate-Beauchamp	7 Cal. Rptr. 3d 715	89
2003	Lieberman v. KCOP Television, Inc.	1 Cal. Rptr. 3d 536	85
1994	Michelson v. Hamada	29 Cal. App. 4th 1566	84
1999	Estrada v. Ramirez	84 Cal. Rptr. 2d 73	72
2001	In Re Justin S.	113 Cal. Rptr. 2d 466	69
2004	Sylmar Air Conditioning v. Pueblo Contracting Services, Inc.†	122 Cal. App. 4th 1049	68
2005	Ingels v. Westwood One Broadcasting Services, Inc.	28 Cal. Rptr. 3d 933	58
2004	California Fair Employment & Housing Commission v. Gemini Aluminum Corp.	18 Cal. Rptr. 3d 906	56
1997	State Farm Fire & Cas. Co. v. Superior Court of L.A. Cty.	54 Cal. App. 4th 625	56
2002	Mattel, Inc. v. Luce, Forward, Hamilton & Scripps	121 Cal. Rptr. 2d 794	55

Showing the 15 most-cited of 150 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 J Gary Hastings on?: J Gary Hastings 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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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).