How do judges of the Washington Supreme Court reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Washington Supreme Court / Joined 1955 / Served to 1967

Richard B. Ott

Justice, Washington Supreme Court

Richard B. Ott was a Justice of the Washington Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1955. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1897–1987
Tenure: 1955–1967 · 12 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1955	Washington Supreme Court	–	–

Education

University of Idaho

Judicial Record

In our data, Ott authored 344 published opinions for the court (1955–1969), plus 47 dissents and 11 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Case (140 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. 105 of these were attributed to Ott 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
1956	State v. Case· Dissent†	298 P.2d 500	140
1962	State v. Michaels· Dissent†	374 P.2d 989	138
1955	Lillions v. Gibbs	289 P.2d 203	108
1959	State v. Schoel· Dissent†	341 P.2d 481	85
1967	King County v. City of Seattle	425 P.2d 887	71
1966	McCurdy v. Union Pacific Railroad· Concurrence†	413 P.2d 617	68
1965	Treffry v. Taylor	408 P.2d 269	67
1956	Truck Insurance Exchange v. Rohde	303 P.2d 659	67
1962	State v. Taylor· Dissent†	371 P.2d 617	61
1969	In Re Adoption of Lybbert	453 P.2d 650	60
1967	State v. Ridgley	424 P.2d 632	56
1965	Burton v. Douglas County	399 P.2d 68	56
1957	State v. Rinkes	306 P.2d 205	53
1967	State Ex Rel. Myhre v. City of Spokane	422 P.2d 790	52
1963	Gray v. Goodson· Dissent†	378 P.2d 413	50

Showing the 15 most-cited of 402 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 Washington Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Richard B. Ott on?: Richard B. Ott was a Justice of the Washington Supreme Court.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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12 years on the Washington Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).