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 2009 / Active

M. Bruce Smith

Associate Justice, California Court of Appeal

M. Bruce Smith is an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal, serving since 2009. He previously served on the Superior Court of California, County of Fresno. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2009 · 17 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2000	Superior Court of California, County of Fresno	–	–
2009	California Court of Appeal	–	–
2014	California Court of Appeal	–	–

Education

UC Law San Francisco		1978
University of California-Santa Barbara	U.S. History	1981

Judicial Record

In our data, Smith authored 15 published opinions for the court (2015–2019), plus 1 dissent. Most cited: People v. Cruz (31 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. 16 of these were attributed to Smith 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
2016	People v. Cruz†	2 Cal. App. 5th 1178	31
2016	Lee v. West Kern Water District†	5 Cal. App. 5th 606	24
2016	People v. Navarette†	4 Cal. App. 5th 829	22
2018	People v. Warren†	234 Cal. Rptr. 3d 733	20
2019	People v. McDaniel†	251 Cal. Rptr. 3d 519	19
2018	People v. Guzman†	232 Cal. Rptr. 3d 503	13
2018	People v. Rodriguez†	237 Cal. Rptr. 3d 550	12
2018	People v. Shields†	233 Cal. Rptr. 3d 701	9
2016	Stand up for California v. State of Cal.†	6 Cal. App. 5th 686	9
2017	People v. Cook†	8 Cal. App. 5th 309	7
2015	Najera v. Shiomoto†	241 Cal. App. 4th 173	6
2018	People v. Williams†	232 Cal. Rptr. 3d 902	5
2018	People v. Lopez†	237 Cal. Rptr. 3d 130	3
2017	People v. Trever P. (In re Trever P.)†	221 Cal. Rptr. 3d 871	3
2017	People v. Suarez· Dissent†	226 Cal. Rptr. 3d 448	1

Showing the 15 most-cited of 16 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 is M. Bruce Smith on?: M. Bruce Smith is 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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17 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).