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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Court of Appeals of Washington / Joined 2008 / Active

Robert J. Leach

Judge, Court of Appeals of Washington

Robert J. Leach is a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Washington, serving since 2008. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2008 · 18 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2008	Court of Appeals of Washington	–	–

Education

University of Washington-Seattle Campus
University of Washington-Seattle Campus

Judicial Record

In our data, Leach authored 442 published opinions for the court (2008–2019), plus 1 concurrence. Most cited: State v. Rafay (125 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. 391 of these were attributed to Leach 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
2012	State v. Rafay†	168 Wash. App. 734	125
2013	Walker v. Quality Loan Service Corp.†	176 Wash. App. 294	58
2010	Moore v. Hagge†	158 Wash. App. 137	49
2010	Moore v. Hagge	241 P.3d 787	47
2008	State v. Jackson	187 P.3d 321	47
2015	In re the Marriage of McNaught†	189 Wash. App. 545	46
2013	Janaszak v. State†	173 Wash. App. 703	44
2012	Tucker v. Department of Social & Health Services	278 P.3d 673	44
2008	State v. Jackson†	145 Wash. App. 814	44
2014	Currier v. Northland Services, Inc.†	182 Wash. App. 733	41
2015	State Of Washington v. Arturo Cayetano-jaimes†	190 Wash. App. 286	40
2014	O'Neill v. City of Shoreline†	183 Wash. App. 15	40
2014	State v. Boyle†	183 Wash. App. 1	38
2015	Didlake v. State†	186 Wash. App. 417	32
2016	The State of Washington, Respondent, v. Dawn Marie Sullivan, Appellant†	196 Wash. App. 277	31

Showing the 15 most-cited of 443 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 Court of Appeals of Washington reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court is Robert J. Leach on?: Robert J. Leach is a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Washington.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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