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 1960 / Served to 1962

Maurice T. Dooling Jr.

Justice, Supreme Court of California

Maurice T. Dooling Jr. was a Justice of the Supreme Court of California, who joined the court in 1960. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1889–1962
Tenure: 1960–1962 · 2 yrs

Judicial service

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

Education

Stanford University

Judicial Record

In our data, Dooling authored 50 published opinions for the court (1946–1962), plus 2 dissents and 2 concurrences. Most cited: People v. Sweeney (187 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. 20 of these were attributed to Dooling 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	People v. Sweeney†	55 Cal. 2d 27	187
1962	In Re Lane· Dissent†	58 Cal. 2d 99	157
1962	Jones v. Superior Court· Dissent†	58 Cal. 2d 56	156
1960	Kusior v. Silver	54 Cal. 2d 603	134
1960	Fifield Manor v. Finston	54 Cal. 2d 632	129
1962	People v. Terry	370 P.2d 985	112
1961	People v. Brommel	56 Cal. 2d 629	96
1962	Consolidated Rock Products Co. v. City of Los Angeles	370 P.2d 342	95
1961	People v. Kendrick	56 Cal. 2d 71	92
1961	Cardenas v. Superior Court	363 P.2d 889	74
1961	Walker v. County of Los Angeles†	55 Cal. 2d 626	74
1961	People v. Oliver†	55 Cal. 2d 761	72
1962	People v. Williams†	57 Cal. 2d 263	68
1961	Erlich v. Municipal Court of Beverly Hills Judicial District†	55 Cal. 2d 553	66
1961	People v. Privett	55 Cal. 2d 698	64

Showing the 15 most-cited of 54 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 Maurice T. Dooling Jr. on?: Maurice T. Dooling Jr. was a Justice of the Supreme Court of California.

Sources

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

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2 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).