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 1994 / Served to 2017

Kathryn Werdegar

Justice, Supreme Court of California

Kathryn Werdegar was a Justice of the Supreme Court of California, who joined the court in 1994. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1936 · age 90
Tenure: 1994–2017 · 23 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1994	Supreme Court of California	–	–

Education

University of California-Berkeley
George Washington University

Judicial Record

In our data, Werdegar authored 343 published opinions for the court (1994–2017), plus 57 dissents and 157 concurrences. Most cited: People v. Superior Court (Romero) (3,137 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. 328 of these were attributed to Werdegar 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
1996	People v. Superior Court (Romero)	13 Cal. 4th 497	3,137
2002	Navellier v. Sletten	52 P.3d 703	1,129
2004	People v. Cole	95 P.3d 811	1,089
1995	People v. Stanley	897 P.2d 481	1,064
1997	People v. Williams	16 Cal. 4th 153	938
2002	Equilon Enterprises v. Consumer Cause, Inc.	52 P.3d 685	935
2000	People v. Kraft	5 P.3d 68	917
2011	Kwikset Corp. v. Superior Court†	51 Cal. 4th 310	891
1999	People v. Rodriguez	971 P.2d 618	877
2004	People v. Coffman	96 P.3d 30	855
2003	Korea Supply Co. v. Lockheed Martin Corp.· Concurrence†	63 P.3d 937	855
2010	People v. Albillar· Concurrence†	51 Cal. 4th 47	852
1997	People v. Holt· Concurrence†	15 Cal. 4th 619	794
2011	People v. Clark· Concurrence†	52 Cal. 4th 856	774
2006	Flatley v. Mauro· Concurrence†	139 P.3d 2	768

Showing the 15 most-cited of 557 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 Kathryn Werdegar on?: Kathryn Werdegar 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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23 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).