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

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

Colorado Court of Appeals / Joined 1988 / Served to 2002

Leonard Plank

Judge, Colorado Court of Appeals

Leonard Plank was a Judge of the Colorado Court of Appeals, who joined the court in 1988. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1932 · age 94
Tenure: 1988–2002 · 14 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1988	Colorado Court of Appeals	–	–

Education

Regis University

Judicial Record

In our data, Plank authored 266 published opinions for the court (1988–2008), plus 5 dissents and 2 concurrences. Most cited: People v. Mandez (702 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. 69 of these were attributed to Plank 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
1999	People v. Mandez	997 P.2d 1254	702
2001	In Re the Custody of C.J.S.	37 P.3d 479	503
1998	Axtell v. Park School District R-3	962 P.2d 319	206
1989	In Re the Marriage of Goellner	770 P.2d 1387	193
1995	Suetrack USA v. Industrial Claim Appeals Office	902 P.2d 854	86
1993	Roberts v. Holland & Hart	857 P.2d 492	65
1990	People v. Vialpando	804 P.2d 219	54
1990	Jefferson County School District R-1 v. Division of Labor in the Department of Labor & Employment	791 P.2d 1217	38
1989	In Re the Marriage of Zebedee	778 P.2d 694	37
1989	In Re the Marriage of Fields	779 P.2d 1371	33
1999	People v. Collie	995 P.2d 765	30
1998	People v. Webster†	987 P.2d 836	30
1999	Kaiser v. Market Square Discount Liquors, Inc.	992 P.2d 636	29
1991	Allabashi v. Lincoln National Sales Corp. of Colorado-Wyoming	824 P.2d 1	29
2002	In Re the Marriage of Atencio	47 P.3d 718	28

Showing the 15 most-cited of 273 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 Court of Appeals reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Leonard Plank on?: Leonard Plank was a Judge of the Colorado Court of Appeals.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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