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 2001 / Served to 2016

Richard M. Mosk

Associate Justice, California Court of Appeal

Richard M. Mosk was an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal (89 judges, selected by merit selection with retention), who joined the court in 2001. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 2001–2016 · 14 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2001	California Court of Appeal	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Mosk authored 229 published opinions for the court (1954–2015), plus 19 dissents and 28 concurrences. Most cited: Colgan v. Leatherman Tool Group, Inc. (181 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. 142 of these were attributed to Mosk 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
2006	Colgan v. Leatherman Tool Group, Inc.	38 Cal. Rptr. 3d 36	181
2002	Kids' Universe v. In2labs· Concurrence†	116 Cal. Rptr. 2d 158	170
2008	Neville v. CHUDACOFF	73 Cal. Rptr. 3d 383	146
2008	Avila v. Continental Airlines, Inc.	165 Cal. App. 4th 1237	129
2009	People v. Franco	180 Cal. App. 4th 713	119
2011	Brown v. Grimes†	192 Cal. App. 4th 265	108
2002	Walker v. Countrywide Home Loans, Inc.	121 Cal. Rptr. 2d 79	104
2013	Los Angeles County Department of Children v. Superior Court†	215 Cal. App. 4th 962	93
2005	Trop v. Sony Pictures Entertainment, Inc.· Dissent†	29 Cal. Rptr. 3d 144	88
2012	Howard Entertainment, Inc. v. Kudrow†	208 Cal. App. 4th 1102	85
2011	Brown v. Ralphs Grocery Co.†	197 Cal. App. 4th 489	83
2011	Cuiellette v. City of Los Angeles†	194 Cal. App. 4th 757	83
2012	Chodos v. Cole†	210 Cal. App. 4th 692	82
2007	Rohde v. Wolf	64 Cal. Rptr. 3d 348	82
2014	Welco Electronics, Inc. v. Mora†	223 Cal. App. 4th 202	81

Showing the 15 most-cited of 276 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 Richard M. Mosk on?: Richard M. Mosk was an Associate 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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14 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).