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 1966 / Served to 1981

James A. Cobey

Associate Justice, California Court of Appeal

James A. Cobey was an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal (89 judges, selected by merit selection with retention), who joined the court in 1966. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1966–1981 · 15 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1966	California Court of Appeal	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Cobey authored 241 published opinions for the court (1967–1982), plus 6 dissents and 4 concurrences. Most cited: Mann v. State of California (124 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. 45 of these were attributed to Cobey 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
1977	Mann v. State of California	70 Cal. App. 3d 773	124
1976	Lerette v. Dean Witter Organization, Inc.	60 Cal. App. 3d 573	101
1977	A & M RECORDS, INC. v. Heilman	75 Cal. App. 3d 554	66
1972	Richardson v. Employers Liability Assurance Corp.· Dissent†	25 Cal. App. 3d 232	62
1975	Wisniewski v. Clary	46 Cal. App. 3d 499	61
1969	People v. Stamp	2 Cal. App. 3d 203	60
1967	Wilson v. Hidden Valley Municipal Water District	256 Cal. App. 2d 271	55
1967	Finot v. Pasadena City Board of Education	250 Cal. App. 2d 189	54
1974	Swinerton & Walberg Co. v. City of Inglewood-Los Angeles County Civic Center Authority	40 Cal. App. 3d 98	49
1976	Cooper v. Jevne	56 Cal. App. 3d 860	45
1974	People v. Herdan†	42 Cal. App. 3d 300	45
1980	Weiner v. Mitchell, Silberberg & Knupp	114 Cal. App. 3d 39	44
1980	Clemente v. State of California	101 Cal. App. 3d 374	44
1979	Spindle v. Chubb/Pacific Indemnity Group	89 Cal. App. 3d 706	44
1981	Wear v. Calderon	121 Cal. App. 3d 818	43

Showing the 15 most-cited of 251 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 James A. Cobey on?: James A. Cobey was an Associate 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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15 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).