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 2003 / Served to 2018

Madeleine I. Flier

Associate Justice, California Court of Appeal

Madeleine I. Flier was an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal, who joined the court in 2003. They previously served on the Superior Court of California, County of Los Angeles. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 2003–2018 · 14 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1980	Superior Court of California, County of Los Angeles	–	–
2003	California Court of Appeal	–	–

Education

Tulane University of Louisiana		1963
University of San Francisco		1968

Judicial Record

In our data, Flier authored 140 published opinions for the court (2004–2017), plus 3 dissents and 2 concurrences. Most cited: Nealy v. City of Santa Monica (138 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. 61 of these were attributed to Flier 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
2015	Nealy v. City of Santa Monica†	234 Cal. App. 4th 359	138
2012	People v. Bradley†	208 Cal. App. 4th 64	130
2008	People v. Carrasco· Dissent†	163 Cal. App. 4th 978	117
2006	Camacho v. AUTO. CLUB OF SO. CALIFORNIA	48 Cal. Rptr. 3d 770	109
2008	People v. Matthew A.	165 Cal. App. 4th 537	108
2006	In Re Aaliyah R.	38 Cal. Rptr. 3d 876	92
2010	MRI Healthcare Center of Glendale, Inc. v. State Farm General Insurance	187 Cal. App. 4th 766	81
2010	Sabi v. Sterling	183 Cal. App. 4th 916	77
2012	Building a Better Redondo, Inc. v. City of Redondo Beach†	203 Cal. App. 4th 852	74
2013	The People v. Valadez†	220 Cal. App. 4th 16	68
2004	Pasadena Live, LLC v. City of Pasadena	8 Cal. Rptr. 3d 233	63
2012	Los Angeles County Department of Children & Family v. Jose C.· Concurrence†	204 Cal. App. 4th 1317	58
2007	Steven M. Garber & Associates v. Eskandarian	59 Cal. Rptr. 3d 1	56
2007	McOwen v. Grossman	63 Cal. Rptr. 3d 615	53
2015	Rodriguez v. Nam Min Cho†	236 Cal. App. 4th 742	50

Showing the 15 most-cited of 145 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 Madeleine I. Flier on?: Madeleine I. Flier 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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14 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).