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 1970 / Served to 1990

Lynn D. Compton

Associate Justice, California Court of Appeal

Lynn D. Compton was an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal, who joined the court in 1970. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1921–2012
Tenure: 1970–1990 · 20 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1970	California Court of Appeal	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Compton authored 338 published opinions for the court (1970–1990), plus 11 dissents and 15 concurrences. Most cited: Jones v. Ortho Pharmaceutical Corp. (153 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. 48 of these were attributed to Compton 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	Jones v. Ortho Pharmaceutical Corp.	163 Cal. App. 3d 396	153
1983	Loehr v. Ventura County Community College District	147 Cal. App. 3d 1071	137
1973	People v. Manning	33 Cal. App. 3d 586	94
1978	Donel, Inc. v. Badalian	87 Cal. App. 3d 327	90
1972	Balido v. Improved MacHinery, Inc.· Concurrence†	29 Cal. App. 3d 633	87
1975	Berman v. Dean Witter & Co., Inc.	44 Cal. App. 3d 999	82
1986	Bouvia v. Superior Court· Concurrence†	179 Cal. App. 3d 1127	74
1983	Krueger v. Bank of America	145 Cal. App. 3d 204	73
1983	Barber v. Superior Court	147 Cal. App. 3d 1006	70
1974	Self v. General Motors Corp.· Concurrence†	42 Cal. App. 3d 1	66
1983	People v. Yu	143 Cal. App. 3d 358	63
1990	People v. Thomas	218 Cal. App. 3d 1477	61
1979	People v. Blessing	94 Cal. App. 3d 835	61
1972	People v. Municipal Court	27 Cal. App. 3d 193	60
1990	Pacific Employers Insurance v. Superior Court	221 Cal. App. 3d 1348	59

Showing the 15 most-cited of 364 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 Lynn D. Compton on?: Lynn D. Compton was an Associate 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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20 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).