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 1962 / Served to 1966

Paul Peek

Justice, Supreme Court of California

Paul Peek was a Justice of the Supreme Court of California (6 judges, selected by merit selection with retention), who joined the court in 1962. He previously served on the California Court of Appeal. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1904–1987
Tenure: 1962–1966 · 4 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1942	California Court of Appeal	–	–
1962	Supreme Court of California	–	–

Education

University of Oregon

Judicial Record

In our data, Peek authored 691 published opinions for the court (1942–1967), plus 12 dissents and 1 concurrence. Most cited: People v. Hernandez (220 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. 208 of these were attributed to Peek 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
1964	People v. Hernandez	61 Cal. 2d 529	220
1966	People v. Crovedi†	65 Cal. 2d 199	149
1964	People v. One 1960 Cadillac Coupe	396 P.2d 706	144
1966	Mulkey v. Reitman	413 P.2d 825	124
1964	Horn v. Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway Co.†	61 Cal. 2d 602	119
1966	In re Woods†	64 Cal. 2d 3	115
1964	People v. Gallegos	62 Cal. 2d 176	100
1964	People v. Groom†	60 Cal. 2d 694	100
1963	Benson v. City of Los Angeles	60 Cal. 2d 355	95
1964	Hergenrether v. East	61 Cal. 2d 440	92
1966	O'Keefe v. South End Rowing Club· Dissent†	64 Cal. 2d 729	75
1966	Vibert v. Berger	64 Cal. 2d 65	75
1965	People v. Teale	63 Cal. 2d 178	72
1966	Barker v. Municipal Court of the Salinas Judicial District of Monterey County	415 P.2d 809	69
1965	People v. Price	63 Cal. 2d 370	68

Showing the 15 most-cited of 704 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 Paul Peek on?: Paul Peek was a 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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4 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).