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 1975 / Served to 2014

Joan Dempsey Klein

Presiding Justice, California Court of Appeal

Joan Dempsey Klein was a Presiding Justice of the California Court of Appeal, who joined the court in 1975. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1975–2014 · 39 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1975	California Court of Appeal	–	–
1978	California Court of Appeal	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Klein authored 483 published opinions for the court (1977–2014), plus 5 dissents and 6 concurrences. Most cited: Rakestraw v. California Physicians' Service (284 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. 97 of these were attributed to Klein 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	Rakestraw v. California Physicians' Service· Dissent†	96 Cal. Rptr. 2d 354	284
1994	Mansell v. Board of Administration of the Public Employees' Retirement System	30 Cal. App. 4th 539	199
1997	Mattco Forge, Inc. v. Arthur Young & Co.	52 Cal. App. 4th 820	155
2012	People v. Islas†	210 Cal. App. 4th 116	130
1984	Smith v. Superior Court	151 Cal. App. 3d 491	128
2007	Faust v. California Portland Cement Co.	58 Cal. Rptr. 3d 729	126
2000	Rubenstein v. Rubenstein	97 Cal. Rptr. 2d 707	123
2011	People v. Spector†	194 Cal. App. 4th 1335	116
2007	People v. Galvan	66 Cal. Rptr. 3d 426	99
2004	People v. Cervantes	12 Cal. Rptr. 3d 774	95
1995	Robertson v. Rodriguez	36 Cal. App. 4th 347	94
1990	Alicia T. v. County of Los Angeles	222 Cal. App. 3d 869	91
2003	Artal v. Allen	3 Cal. Rptr. 3d 458	83
1986	Wilhelm v. Pray, Price, Williams & Russell	186 Cal. App. 3d 1324	82
1986	Chan v. Drexel Burnham Lambert, Inc.	178 Cal. App. 3d 632	82

Showing the 15 most-cited of 494 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 Joan Dempsey Klein on?: Joan Dempsey Klein was a Presiding 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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39 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).