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

The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.

Supreme Court of Hawaii / Joined 1938 / Served to 1960

Samuel Barnet Kemp

Justice, Supreme Court of Hawaii

Samuel Barnet Kemp was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Hawaii, who joined the court in 1938. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1871–1962
Tenure: 1938–1960 · 22 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1938	Supreme Court of Hawaii	–	–

Education

Texas A & M University-College Station
The University of Texas at Austin

Judicial Record

In our data, Kemp authored 100 published opinions for the court (1938–1950), plus 2 dissents and 3 concurrences. Most cited: Estate Bernice P. Bishop (34 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. 13 of these were attributed to Kemp 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
1943	Estate Bernice P. Bishop	36 Haw. 403	34
1938	Pioneer Mill Co. v. Ward†	34 Haw. 686	24
1942	Godbold v. Manibog	36 Haw. 206	18
1941	Territory of Hawaii v. Gagarin	36 Haw. 1	16
1946	Akai v. Lewis	37 Haw. 374	13
1942	Territory of Hawaii v. Ota	36 Haw. 80	13
1943	City & County of Honolulu v. Board of Water Supply	36 Haw. 348	10
1950	City & County of Honolulu v. Tam See	38 Haw. 592	9
1949	Berkson v. Post· Concurrence	38 Haw. 436	9
1943	Reynolds v. Van Culin	36 Haw. 556	9
1940	West v. West	35 Haw. 461	9
1940	Carpenter v. Honolulu Rapid Transit Co.	35 Haw. 761	8
1940	Kellett v. City & County of Honolulu	35 Haw. 447	8
1943	In Re Perry Tax Appeal	36 Haw. 340	7
1940	Collins v. Ako	35 Haw. 440	7

Showing the 15 most-cited of 105 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 Hawaii reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.
Which court was Samuel Barnet Kemp on?: Samuel Barnet Kemp was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Hawaii.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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