How do judges of the Court of Appeals of Washington reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Court of Appeals of Washington / Joined 2010 / Active

Michael S. Spearman

Judge, Court of Appeals of Washington

Michael S. Spearman is a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Washington, serving since 2010. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2010 · 16 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2010	Court of Appeals of Washington	–	–

Education

Polytechnic Institute of New York University

Judicial Record

In our data, Spearman authored 331 published opinions for the court (2010–2017), plus 1 concurrence. Most cited: Hulbert Revoc. Living Trust v. Port Everett (51 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. 314 of these were attributed to Spearman 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	Hulbert Revoc. Living Trust v. Port Everett	245 P.3d 779	51
2011	Hulbert v. Port of Everett†	159 Wash. App. 389	46
2015	Pham v. Corbett†	187 Wash. App. 816	39
2011	Harvey v. Obermeit	261 P.3d 671	33
2017	Deborah Ewing v. Green Tree Services Llc†	198 Wash. App. 515	31
2013	Lake Chelan Shores Homeowners Ass'n v. St. Paul Fire & Marine Insurance†	176 Wash. App. 168	31
2014	Hurley v. Port Blakely Tree Farms LP†	182 Wash. App. 753	28
2015	Roberta S. Podbielancik, App. v. Lpp Mortgage, Ltd, Res.†	191 Wash. App. 662	24
2015	State v. Walker†	185 Wash. App. 790	24
2013	Young Soo Kim v. Choong-Hyun Lee†	174 Wash. App. 319	24
2012	Durland v. San Juan County†	174 Wash. App. 1	24
2012	State v. Hummel†	165 Wash. App. 749	24
2017	Rebecca A. Rufin, Appellant, v. the City of Seattle, Respondent†	199 Wash. App. 348	21
2017	State Of Washington v. Ronald Dale Wafford†	199 Wash. App. 32	21
2017	State Of Washington v. Kathryn Anne St Clare†	198 Wash. App. 371	19

Showing the 15 most-cited of 332 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 Court of Appeals of Washington reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court is Michael S. Spearman on?: Michael S. Spearman is a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Washington.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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16 years on the Court of Appeals of Washington. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).