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 2001 / Active

Mark Benedict Simons

Associate Justice, California Court of Appeal

Mark Benedict Simons is an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal, serving since 2001. He previously served on the Superior Court of California, County of Contra Costa. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2001 · 25 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1999	Superior Court of California, County of Contra Costa	–	–
2001	California Court of Appeal	–	–

Education

University of Michigan-Ann Arbor		1967
University of Chicago		1970

Judicial Record

In our data, Simons authored 142 published opinions for the court (1995–2019), plus 2 dissents and 1 concurrence. Most cited: Wilson & Wilson v. City Council (177 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. 77 of these were attributed to Simons 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
2011	Wilson & Wilson v. City Council†	191 Cal. App. 4th 1559	177
2004	Gutierrez v. Autowest, Inc.	7 Cal. Rptr. 3d 267	162
2011	People v. Hill†	191 Cal. App. 4th 1104	140
2002	Seelig v. Infinity Broadcasting Corp.	119 Cal. Rptr. 2d 108	109
2010	Seltzer v. Barnes	182 Cal. App. 4th 953	87
2001	Marin Storage & Trucking, Inc. v. Benco Contracting & Engineering, Inc.†	89 Cal. App. 4th 1042	81
2002	People v. Napoles†	104 Cal. App. 4th 108	77
2012	SCI California Furneral Services, Inc. v. Five Bridges Foundation†	203 Cal. App. 4th 549	75
2014	Altavion, Inc. v. Konica Minolta System Laboratory, Inc.†	226 Cal. App. 4th 26	74
2012	Frog Creek Partners, LLC v. Vance Brown, Inc.†	206 Cal. App. 4th 515	69
2008	Murphy v. Murphy	164 Cal. App. 4th 376	67
2012	Lui v. City & County of San Francisco†	211 Cal. App. 4th 962	62
2012	People v. Wade†	204 Cal. App. 4th 1142	61
2006	AILANTO PROPERTIES, INC. v. City of Half Moon Bay	48 Cal. Rptr. 3d 340	61
2005	Honig v. San Francisco Planning Department	25 Cal. Rptr. 3d 649	61

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 is Mark Benedict Simons on?: Mark Benedict Simons is an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal.

Sources

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

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25 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).