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 1864 / Served to 1866

Silas S. Sanderson

Justice, Supreme Court of California

Silas S. Sanderson was a Justice of the Supreme Court of California, who joined the court in 1864. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1824 · age 202
Tenure: 1864–1866 · 2 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1864	Supreme Court of California	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Sanderson authored 151 published opinions for the court (1864–1867), plus 3 dissents and 4 concurrences. Most cited: Bailey v. Taaffe (187 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. 158 of these were attributed to Sanderson 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
1866	Bailey v. Taaffe†	29 Cal. 422	187
1866	Lathrop v. Bampton†	31 Cal. 17	99
1866	Taylor v. Palmer†	31 Cal. 240	96
1864	Gray v. Dougherty†	25 Cal. 266	72
1864	Moss v. Shear†	25 Cal. 38	68
1864	Boyce v. California Stage Co.†	25 Cal. 460	59
1865	People ex rel. Dorsey v. Smyth†	28 Cal. 21	58
1864	Bourland v. Hildreth· Dissent†	26 Cal. 161	53
1864	Richardson v. McNulty†	24 Cal. 339	50
1865	People ex rel. Budd v. Holden†	28 Cal. 123	49
1865	People v. Yslas†	27 Cal. 630	48
1865	Board of Commissioners (No. 2) v. Younger†	29 Cal. 147	47
1866	Garwood v. Garwood†	29 Cal. 514	43
1864	Rowland v. Kreyenhagen†	24 Cal. 52	43
1864	Irwin v. Backus†	25 Cal. 214	41

Showing the 15 most-cited of 159 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 Silas S. Sanderson on?: Silas S. Sanderson was a 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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2 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).