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 1867 / Served to 1880

Joseph B. Crockett

Justice, Supreme Court of California

Joseph B. Crockett was a Justice of the Supreme Court of California, who joined the court in 1867. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1808 · age 218
Tenure: 1867–1880 · 12 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1867	Supreme Court of California	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Crockett authored 370 published opinions for the court (1868–1879), plus 16 dissents and 21 concurrences. Most cited: People v. Tilton (80 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. 405 of these were attributed to Crockett 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
1869	People v. Tilton· Dissent†	37 Cal. 614	80
1873	People v. Stanley†	47 Cal. 113	73
1869	People v. Scoggins†	37 Cal. 676	65
1869	Mecham v. McKay†	37 Cal. 154	64
1872	People v. Sanford· Concurrence†	43 Cal. 29	63
1870	Harpending v. Haight· Concurrence†	39 Cal. 189	63
1869	Martin v. Zellerbach†	38 Cal. 300	54
1877	Fernandes v. Sacramento City Ry.†	52 Cal. 45	52
1876	Dean v. Davis†	51 Cal. 406	52
1872	City of San Francisco v. Canavan†	42 Cal. 541	50
1874	Hagar v. Board of Supervisors†	47 Cal. 222	48
1874	Love v. Baehr†	47 Cal. 364	47
1870	Agard v. Valencia†	39 Cal. 292	47
1871	Hanson v. McCue· Concurrence†	42 Cal. 303	46
1871	Bruck v. Tucker· Dissent†	42 Cal. 346	46

Showing the 15 most-cited of 407 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 Joseph B. Crockett on?: Joseph B. Crockett 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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12 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).