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 1961 / Served to 1985

Otto Kaus

Associate Justice, Supreme Court of California

Otto Kaus was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of California (6 judges, selected by merit selection with retention), who joined the court in 1961. He previously served on the California Court of Appeal. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1920 · age 106
Tenure: 1961–1985 · 23 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1981	Supreme Court of California	–	–
1961	Supreme Court of California	–	–
1964	California Court of Appeal	–	–
1964	Supreme Court of California	–	–
1966	Supreme Court of California	–	–
1981	Supreme Court of California	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Kaus authored 164 published opinions for the court (1965–1985), plus 39 dissents and 64 concurrences. Most cited: People v. Dillon (1,034 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. 187 of these were attributed to Kaus 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
1983	People v. Dillon· Concurrence†	668 P.2d 697	1,034
1985	People v. Castro	696 P.2d 111	443
1983	People v. Fields· Concurrence†	673 P.2d 680	392
1982	Davidson v. City of Westminster	649 P.2d 894	367
1982	People v. Sims· Dissent†	651 P.2d 321	364
1985	Brandt v. Superior Court	693 P.2d 796	352
1983	People v. Easley	671 P.2d 813	345
1983	Williams v. State of California	664 P.2d 137	331
1982	People v. Shirley· Concurrence†	723 P.2d 1354	314
1984	People v. Bledsoe	681 P.2d 291	291
1983	People v. Belmontes	667 P.2d 686	285
1984	People v. Ramos	689 P.2d 430	256
1982	People v. Robertson	655 P.2d 279	253
1984	People v. Harris· Dissent†	679 P.2d 433	239
1984	People v. Tassell	679 P.2d 1	237

Showing the 15 most-cited of 267 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 Otto Kaus on?: Otto Kaus was an Associate 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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23 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).