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 1962 / Served to 1982

Mathew Tobriner

Justice, Supreme Court of California

Mathew Tobriner was a Justice of the Supreme Court of California, who joined the court in 1962. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1904–1982
Tenure: 1962–1982 · 19 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1962	Supreme Court of California	–	–

Education

Stanford University
Harvard University

Judicial Record

In our data, Tobriner authored 454 published opinions for the court (1962–1982), plus 43 dissents and 23 concurrences. Most cited: People v. Johnson (2,018 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. 139 of these were attributed to Tobriner 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
1980	People v. Johnson	606 P.2d 738	2,018
1966	Gray v. Zurich Insurance Co.	419 P.2d 168	1,122
1976	Tarasoff v. Regents of University of California	551 P.2d 334	1,035
1968	Dillon v. Legg	68 Cal. 2d 728	1,026
1965	People v. Dorado	62 Cal. 2d 338	934
1968	People v. Anderson	447 P.2d 942	762
1979	People v. Flannel	603 P.2d 1	712
1980	Tameny v. Atlantic Richfield Co.	610 P.2d 1330	695
1978	Barker v. Lull Engineering Co.	573 P.2d 443	581
1970	People v. West	477 P.2d 409	552
1971	Bixby v. Pierno	481 P.2d 242	549
1978	American Motorcycle Assn. v. Superior Court	578 P.2d 899	547
1976	In Re Marriage of Brown	544 P.2d 561	507
1968	Johnson v. State of California	447 P.2d 352	504
1964	People v. Morse	388 P.2d 33	474

Showing the 15 most-cited of 520 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 Mathew Tobriner on?: Mathew Tobriner was a Justice of the Supreme Court of California.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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19 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).