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 2015 / Served to 2021

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar

Associate Justice, Supreme Court of California

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of California, who joined the court in 2015. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1972 · age 54
Tenure: 2015–2021 · 6 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2015	Supreme Court of California	–	–

Education

Harvard University	Political Psychology and Government, magna cum laude	1993
Stanford University	Political Science	1996
Yale University		1997
Stanford University	Political Science	2000

Judicial Record

In our data, Cuéllar authored 2 published opinions for the court (2017–2018). Most cited: People v. Hall (98 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. 2 of these were attributed to Cuéllar 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
2017	People v. Hall†	213 Cal. Rptr. 3d 561	98
2018	People v. Johnson†	241 Cal. Rptr. 3d 782	87

Showing the 2 most-cited of 2 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 Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar on?: Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of California.

Sources

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

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6 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).