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 2023 / Active

Patricia Guerrero

Chief Justice, Supreme Court of California

Patricia Guerrero is a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of California (6 judges, selected by merit selection with retention), serving since 2023. She previously served on the Superior Court of California, County of San Diego and California Court of Appeal. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2023 · 3 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2013	Superior Court of California, County of San Diego	–	–
2017	California Court of Appeal	–	–
2023	Supreme Court of California	–	–

Education

University of California-Berkeley		1974
Stanford University		1977

Judicial Record

In our data, Guerrero authored 6 published opinions for the court (2018–2019). Most cited: People v. Carter (38 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. 6 of these were attributed to Guerrero 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
2019	People v. Carter†	246 Cal. Rptr. 3d 498	38
2019	People v. Jimenez†	243 Cal. Rptr. 3d 786	36
2018	Carrington v. Starbucks Corp.†	241 Cal. Rptr. 3d 647	28
2018	MCI Commc'ns Servs., Inc. v. Cal. Dep't of Tax & Fee Admin.†	239 Cal. Rptr. 3d 241	20
2019	Scott v. City of San Diego†	250 Cal. Rptr. 3d 432	14
2018	People v. Arebalos-Cabrera†	238 Cal. Rptr. 3d 103	6

Showing the 6 most-cited of 6 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 is Patricia Guerrero on?: Patricia Guerrero is a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of California.

Sources

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

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3 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).