How do judges of the California Court of Appeal reach the bench?

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

California Court of Appeal / Joined 1949 / Served to 1955

Louis C. Drapeau

Justice, California Court of Appeal

Louis C. Drapeau was a Justice of the California Court of Appeal, who joined the court in 1949. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1949–1955 · 6 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1949	California Court of Appeal	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Drapeau authored 396 published opinions for the court (1941–1961), plus 1 concurrence. Most cited: Wilson v. Los Angeles County Civil Service Commission (57 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. 87 of these were attributed to Drapeau 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
1952	Wilson v. Los Angeles County Civil Service Commission	246 P.2d 688	57
1954	People v. Siu	126 Cal. App. 2d 41	42
1952	Sonbergh v. MacQuarrie	112 Cal. App. 2d 771	34
1949	Cole v. Ridings	95 Cal. App. 2d 136	33
1950	Murrill v. State Board of Accountancy	97 Cal. App. 2d 709	32
1949	Barder v. McClung	93 Cal. App. 2d 692	30
1949	People v. Frank	94 Cal. App. 2d 740	29
1961	Mashon v. Haddock	190 Cal. App. 2d 151	27
1953	People v. Silverstein	121 Cal. App. 2d 140	26
1942	Caminetti v. State Mutual Life Insurance Co.	52 Cal. App. 2d 321	26
1951	King v. King	107 Cal. App. 2d 257	25
1951	Jeffers v. Screen Extras Guild, Inc.	107 Cal. App. 2d 253	25
1942	Dazey v. Dazey	50 Cal. App. 2d 15	25
1953	Kimberlin v. Los Angeles City High School District	115 Cal. App. 2d 459	23
1957	In Re Schubert	153 Cal. App. 2d 138	22

Showing the 15 most-cited of 397 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 California Court of Appeal reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Louis C. Drapeau on?: Louis C. Drapeau was a Justice of the California Court of Appeal.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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