How do judges of the Colorado Supreme Court reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.

Colorado Supreme Court / Joined 1980 / Served to 1993

Joseph R. Quinn

Justice, Colorado Supreme Court

Joseph R. Quinn was a Justice of the Colorado Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1980. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1932 · age 94
Tenure: 1980–1993 · 12 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1980	Colorado Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Rutgers University-New Brunswick

Judicial Record

In our data, Quinn authored 422 published opinions for the court (1980–1993), plus 92 dissents and 31 concurrences. Most cited: People v. Lybarger (1,071 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. 204 of these were attributed to Quinn 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
1985	People v. Lybarger	700 P.2d 910	1,071
1980	People v. Lucero	615 P.2d 660	1,007
1991	People v. Garner†	806 P.2d 366	955
1984	Department of Health v. Donahue	690 P.2d 243	733
1981	People v. Elkhatib	632 P.2d 275	687
1981	People v. Christian	632 P.2d 1031	673
1985	People v. Medina	705 P.2d 961	652
1988	People v. Montoya	753 P.2d 729	592
1987	Wilson v. People	743 P.2d 415	590
1991	People v. Gennings	808 P.2d 839	488
1985	Schubert v. People	698 P.2d 788	452
1989	People v. Zapata· Concurrence†	779 P.2d 1307	422
1990	People v. Rodriguez· Dissent†	794 P.2d 965	410
1991	People v. Garcia	815 P.2d 937	405
1991	In Re Marriage of Jones· Dissent†	812 P.2d 1152	385

Showing the 15 most-cited of 545 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 Colorado Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Joseph R. Quinn on?: Joseph R. Quinn was a Justice of the Colorado Supreme Court.

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 Colorado Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).