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 1972 / Served to 1991

Ronald M. George

Associate Justice, Supreme Court of California

Ronald M. George was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of California (6 judges, selected by merit selection with retention), who joined the court in 1972. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1940 · age 86
Tenure: 1972–1991 · 19 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1972	Supreme Court of California	–	–
1978	Supreme Court of California	–	–
1987	Supreme Court of California	–	–
1978	Supreme Court of California	–	–
1987	Supreme Court of California	–	–

Education

University of California-Berkeley
Stanford University

Judicial Record

In our data, George authored 419 published opinions for the court (1991–2010), plus 1 concurrence. Most cited: People v. Kelly (3,039 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. 1 of these was attributed to George 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	People v. Kelly	146 P.3d 547	3,039
2001	People v. Cunningham	25 P.3d 519	1,013
1994	People v. Ewoldt	867 P.2d 757	1,001
2005	Yanowitz v. L'OREAL USA, INC.	116 P.3d 1123	838
2007	People v. Sandoval	161 P.3d 1146	799
2000	People v. Jenkins	997 P.2d 1044	769
1997	People v. Bradford	15 Cal. 4th 1229	756
2006	People v. Rogers	141 P.3d 135	743
1993	People v. Zapien	846 P.2d 704	691
2002	People v. Hughes	39 P.3d 432	674
1994	People v. Crittenden	885 P.2d 887	674
1999	People v. Smithey	978 P.2d 1171	635
2006	People v. Ledesma	140 P.3d 657	632
1996	Vons Companies, Inc. v. Seabest Foods, Inc.	14 Cal. 4th 434	610
2005	People v. Manriquez	123 P.3d 614	563

Showing the 15 most-cited of 420 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 Ronald M. George on?: Ronald M. George was an Associate 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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19 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).