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 1960 / Served to 1971

Martin J. Coughlin

Justice, California Court of Appeal

Martin J. Coughlin was a Justice of the California Court of Appeal, who joined the court in 1960. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1901–1983
Tenure: 1960–1971 · 11 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1960	California Court of Appeal	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Coughlin authored 470 published opinions for the court (1955–1977), plus 2 concurrences. Most cited: Harm v. Frasher (113 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. 67 of these were attributed to Coughlin 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
1960	Harm v. Frasher	181 Cal. App. 2d 405	113
1960	People v. Miller	185 Cal. App. 2d 59	56
1965	Paularena v. Superior Court	231 Cal. App. 2d 906	54
1971	People v. Daniels	16 Cal. App. 3d 36	52
1960	Davy v. Public National Insurance	181 Cal. App. 2d 387	50
1958	Bonfils v. Pacific Automobile Insurance	165 Cal. App. 2d 152	48
1961	Meyer v. Board of Trustees of San Dieguito Union High School District	195 Cal. App. 2d 420	47
1961	Greco v. Oregon Mutual Fire Insurance	191 Cal. App. 2d 674	44
1968	People v. Kern	264 Cal. App. 2d 962	43
1960	People v. Jackson	186 Cal. App. 2d 307	43
1961	People v. Ellsworth	190 Cal. App. 2d 844	39
1956	Adoption of Burton	147 Cal. App. 2d 125	39
1963	Spaziani v. Millar	215 Cal. App. 2d 667	38
1969	Grier v. T.R.S.†	1 Cal. App. 3d 178	36
1963	People v. Kuhn	216 Cal. App. 2d 695	35

Showing the 15 most-cited of 472 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 Martin J. Coughlin on?: Martin J. Coughlin was a 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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11 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).