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 1849 / Served to 1851

Nathaniel Bennett

Justice, Supreme Court of California

Nathaniel Bennett was a Justice of the Supreme Court of California, who joined the court in 1849. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1818 · age 208
Tenure: 1849–1851 · 1 yr

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1849	Supreme Court of California	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Bennett authored 81 published opinions for the court (1850–1851), plus 3 dissents. Most cited: People ex rel. Mulford v. Turner (46 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. 81 of these were attributed to Bennett 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
1850	People ex rel. Mulford v. Turner†	1 Cal. 143	46
1850	People ex rel. Field v. Turner†	1 Cal. 152	37
1850	People v. Smith	1 Cal. 9	29
1850	Mateer v. Brown†	1 Cal. 221	28
1851	People ex rel. Campbell v. Clark· Dissent†	1 Cal. 406	24
1851	People v. McCauley†	1 Cal. 379	21
1851	De Briar v. Minturn	1 Cal. 450	19
1850	Ringgold v. Haven & Livingston†	1 Cal. 108	18
1851	Weber v. City of San Francisco†	1 Cal. 455	17
1850	Loring v. Illsley†	1 Cal. 24	17
1851	Gunter v. Geary†	1 Cal. 462	16
1850	People ex rel. Attorney General v. Naglee†	1 Cal. 232	16
1850	Ex parte Kyle†	1 Cal. 331	16
1850	Suñol v. Hepburn†	1 Cal. 254	14
1850	Belt v. Davis†	1 Cal. 134	14

Showing the 15 most-cited of 84 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 Nathaniel Bennett on?: Nathaniel Bennett 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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1 year 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).