How do judges of the Court of Appeals of Washington reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Court of Appeals of Washington / Joined 1996 / Active

Stephen M. Brown

Judge, Court of Appeals of Washington

Stephen M. Brown is a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Washington, serving since 1996. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 1996 · 29 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1996	Court of Appeals of Washington	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Brown authored 940 published opinions for the court (1997–2015), plus 53 dissents and 15 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Castro (192 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. 681 of these were attributed to Brown 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
2007	State v. Castro	170 P.3d 78	192
2011	In re the Welfare of S.J.†	162 Wash. App. 873	87
2014	State v. Barry†	184 Wash. App. 790	82
2010	In re the Marriage of Williams†	156 Wash. App. 22	77
2010	Williams v. Williams	232 P.3d 573	75
2002	Mendez v. Palm Harbor Homes, Inc.†	111 Wash. App. 446	71
2001	Standing Rock Homeowners Ass'n v. Misich†	106 Wash. App. 231	69
2004	In re the Marriage of Dodd†	120 Wash. App. 638	67
2004	In Re Marriage of Dodd	86 P.3d 801	65
2009	Kinney v. Cook†	150 Wash. App. 187	57
2002	State v. Romero	54 P.3d 1255	57
2002	State v. Romero†	113 Wash. App. 779	57
2007	State v. Duckett· Dissent†	141 Wash. App. 797	56
2009	Kinney v. Cook	208 P.3d 1	55
2000	DeYoung v. Cenex Ltd.	1 P.3d 587	54

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,008 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 Court of Appeals of Washington reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court is Stephen M. Brown on?: Stephen M. Brown is a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Washington.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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