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 1977 / Served to 1987

Rose Elizabeth Bird

Chief Justice, Supreme Court of California

Rose Elizabeth Bird was a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of California, who joined the court in 1977. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1936–1999
Tenure: 1977–1987 · 10 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1977	Supreme Court of California	–	–
1977	Supreme Court of California	–	–

Education

University of California-Berkeley

Judicial Record

In our data, Bird authored 170 published opinions for the court (1977–1987), plus 82 dissents and 120 concurrences. Most cited: People v. Johnson (2,018 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. 209 of these were attributed to Bird 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
1980	People v. Johnson· Concurrence†	606 P.2d 738	2,018
1978	People v. Wheeler· Concurrence†	583 P.2d 748	1,612
1983	People v. Dillon· Concurrence†	668 P.2d 697	1,034
1979	People v. Pope	590 P.2d 859	966
1982	In Re Marriage of Flaherty	646 P.2d 179	754
1979	People v. Flannel· Concurrence†	603 P.2d 1	712
1986	Ballard v. Uribe· Concurrence†	715 P.2d 624	606
1978	Amador Valley Joint Union High School District v. State Board of Equalization· Concurrence†	22 Cal. 3d 208	542
1982	People v. Wickersham	650 P.2d 311	493
1981	California Teachers Ass'n v. San Diego Community College District· Dissent†	621 P.2d 856	492
1981	People v. Watson· Dissent†	637 P.2d 279	489
1983	Committee on Children's Television, Inc. v. General Foods Corp.· Concurrence†	673 P.2d 660	477
1978	Fare v. Tony C.· Concurrence†	582 P.2d 957	468
1985	People v. Castro· Concurrence†	696 P.2d 111	443
1983	Olson v. Cory· Concurrence†	673 P.2d 720	442

Showing the 15 most-cited of 373 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 Rose Elizabeth Bird on?: Rose Elizabeth Bird was a Chief 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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10 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).