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 1903 / Served to 1923

Lucien Shaw

Justice, Supreme Court of California

Lucien Shaw was a Justice of the Supreme Court of California, who joined the court in 1903. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1845 · age 181
Tenure: 1903–1923 · 20 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1903	Supreme Court of California	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Shaw authored 1,136 published opinions for the court (1903–1923), plus 68 dissents and 113 concurrences. Most cited: Pereira v. Pereira (223 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. 40 of these were attributed to Shaw 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
1909	Pereira v. Pereira	103 P. 488	223
1920	Ex Parte Daniels· Dissent	192 P. 442	199
1903	Katz v. Walkinshaw	70 P. 663	160
1915	Western Indemnity Co. v. Pillsbury· Concurrence	151 P. 398	159
1915	Vallejo & Northern R.R. v. Reed Orchard Co.	147 P. 238	157
1911	Bond v. United R.R. of S.F.	113 P. 366	157
1904	Green v. Soule	78 P. 337	156
1915	Brown v. Brown	147 P. 1168	152
1916	Western Metal Supply Co. v. Pillsbury· Concurrence	156 P. 491	144
1907	Bacon v. Bacon	89 P. 317	138
1910	Boone v. Templeman	110 P. 947	135
1922	Mar Shee v. Maryland Assurance Corp.· Concurrence	210 P. 269	130
1913	People v. California Fish Co.	138 P. 79	130
1908	J. F. Parkinson Co. v. Building Trades Council· Dissent	98 P. 1027	122
1905	In Re the Estate of Arnold	82 P. 262	114

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,328 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 Lucien Shaw on?: Lucien Shaw was a Justice of the Supreme Court of California.

Sources

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

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20 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).