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 1966 / Served to 1979

Robert S. Thompson

Associate Justice, California Court of Appeal

Robert S. Thompson was an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal (89 judges, selected by merit selection with retention), who joined the court in 1966. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1966–1979 · 12 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1966	California Court of Appeal	–	–
1968	California Court of Appeal	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Thompson authored 284 published opinions for the court (1967–1979), plus 4 dissents and 7 concurrences. Most cited: Donald v. Garry (71 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. 35 of these were attributed to Thompson 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
1971	Donald v. Garry	19 Cal. App. 3d 769	71
1971	Esgro Central, Inc. v. General Insurance	20 Cal. App. 3d 1054	69
1976	Kaiser Steel Corp. v. Westinghouse Electric Corp.	55 Cal. App. 3d 737	67
1976	People v. Blackburn	56 Cal. App. 3d 685	62
1976	Mobaldi v. Regents of University of California	55 Cal. App. 3d 573	61
1974	Reifler v. Superior Court	39 Cal. App. 3d 479	60
1975	Wright v. Williams	47 Cal. App. 3d 802	57
1975	Powers v. Ashton	45 Cal. App. 3d 783	54
1975	Tool Research & Engineering Corp. v. Henigson	46 Cal. App. 3d 675	52
1977	Held v. Arant	67 Cal. App. 3d 748	49
1973	Greenberg v. Equitable Life Assurance Society of United States	34 Cal. App. 3d 994	48
1978	Nichols v. Canoga Industries	83 Cal. App. 3d 956	42
1975	In Re Ricardo M.	52 Cal. App. 3d 744	42
1970	Clemens v. Regents of the University of California	8 Cal. App. 3d 1	40
1976	People v. Demond· Concurrence†	59 Cal. App. 3d 574	37

Showing the 15 most-cited of 295 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 Robert S. Thompson on?: Robert S. Thompson 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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12 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).