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 1979 / Served to 1987

Joseph R. Grodin

Associate Justice, Supreme Court of California

Joseph R. Grodin was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of California (6 judges, selected by merit selection with retention), who joined the court in 1979. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1930 · age 96
Tenure: 1979–1987 · 8 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1982	Supreme Court of California	–	–
1979	Supreme Court of California	–	–
1982	Supreme Court of California	–	–
1982	Supreme Court of California	–	–

Education

Stanford University
Yale University

Judicial Record

In our data, Grodin authored 76 published opinions for the court (1982–1987), plus 1 dissent and 39 concurrences. Most cited: People v. Ledesma (1,290 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. 44 of these were attributed to Grodin 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
1987	People v. Ledesma· Concurrence†	729 P.2d 839	1,290
1984	Palma v. U.S. Industrial Fasteners, Inc.†	36 Cal. 3d 171	727
1985	People v. Lance W.	694 P.2d 744	704
1986	Ballard v. Uribe	715 P.2d 624	606
1986	People v. Rodriguez	726 P.2d 113	560
1985	People v. Castro· Concurrence†	696 P.2d 111	443
1985	People v. Balderas	711 P.2d 480	427
1985	People v. Brown	726 P.2d 516	411
1986	People v. Burgener†	41 Cal. 3d 505	357
1986	People v. Allen	729 P.2d 115	324
1986	People v. Overstreet· Dissent†	726 P.2d 1288	305
1986	Producers Dairy Delivery Co. v. Sentry Insurance· Concurrence†	718 P.2d 920	283
1984	People v. Alcala	685 P.2d 1126	278
1985	Tech-Bilt, Inc. v. Woodward-Clyde & Associates	698 P.2d 159	274
1984	People v. Geiger	674 P.2d 1303	261

Showing the 15 most-cited of 116 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 R. Grodin on?: Joseph R. Grodin was an Associate 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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8 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).