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 1970 / Served to 1988

Mo Sabraw

Justice, California Court of Appeal

Mo Sabraw was a Justice of the California Court of Appeal, who joined the court in 1970. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1970–1988 · 18 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1970	California Court of Appeal	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Sabraw authored 58 published opinions for the court (1979–1988), plus 2 dissents and 1 concurrence. Most cited: Kinoshita v. Horio (67 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. 9 of these were attributed to Sabraw 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
1986	Kinoshita v. Horio	186 Cal. App. 3d 959	67
1986	Brooks v. American Broadcasting Co.	179 Cal. App. 3d 500	53
1985	Kearl v. Lederle Laboratories	172 Cal. App. 3d 812	51
1979	Cavers v. Cushman Motor Sales, Inc.	95 Cal. App. 3d 338	44
1986	Sklar v. Franchise Tax Board	185 Cal. App. 3d 616	29
1988	People v. Robinson	199 Cal. App. 3d 816	24
1986	People v. Buckley	183 Cal. App. 3d 489	20
1985	In Re Reina	171 Cal. App. 3d 638	20
1979	People v. Johnson	95 Cal. App. 3d 352	20
1986	McKeon v. Hastings College of the Law	185 Cal. App. 3d 877	19
1985	People v. Albright	173 Cal. App. 3d 883	18
1987	County of Sonoma v. State Board of Equalization	195 Cal. App. 3d 982	17
1985	People v. Pertsoni	172 Cal. App. 3d 369	17
1987	People v. McGhee	193 Cal. App. 3d 1333	16
1987	The Energy Group, Inc. v. Liddington	192 Cal. App. 3d 1520	16

Showing the 15 most-cited of 61 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 Mo Sabraw on?: Mo Sabraw 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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18 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).