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 1870 / Served to 1872

Jackson Temple

Justice, Supreme Court of California

Jackson Temple was a Justice of the Supreme Court of California, who joined the court in 1870. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1827 · age 199
Tenure: 1870–1872 · 2 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1870	Supreme Court of California	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Temple authored 171 published opinions for the court (1870–1903), plus 15 dissents and 19 concurrences. Most cited: Katz v. Walkinshaw (160 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. 75 of these were attributed to Temple 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
1903	Katz v. Walkinshaw· Separate	70 P. 663	160
1901	People v. Williams	65 P. 323	132
1901	In Re Begerow	65 P. 828	104
1901	In Re the Estate of Fair· Dissent	60 P. 442	92
1899	Fragley v. Phelan· Separate	58 P. 923	65
1870	Harpending v. Haight· Dissent†	39 Cal. 189	63
1870	Page v. Fowler†	39 Cal. 412	60
1902	Winchester v. Howard	64 P. 692	58
1871	People v. Ah Sam†	41 Cal. 645	52
1871	Love v. Watkins†	40 Cal. 547	51
1900	Britton v. Board of Election Commissioners· Concurrence	61 P. 1115	50
1900	People v. Flannelly· Dissent	60 P. 670	47
1870	Brenham v. Story†	39 Cal. 179	47
1902	Beveridge v. Lewis	67 P. 1040	46
1900	Westerfeld v. New York Life Insurance	58 P. 92	44

Showing the 15 most-cited of 210 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 Jackson Temple on?: Jackson Temple 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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2 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).