How do judges of the California Court of Appeal reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.

California Court of Appeal / Joined 2009 / Served to 2018

Terence Lee Bruiniers

Associate Justice, California Court of Appeal

Terence Lee Bruiniers was an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal, who joined the court in 2009. They previously served on the Superior Court of California, County of Contra Costa. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 2009–2018 · 9 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2007	Superior Court of California, County of Contra Costa	–	–
2009	California Court of Appeal	–	–

Education

University of California-Berkeley		1969
University of California-Berkeley		1973

Judicial Record

In our data, Bruiniers authored 89 published opinions for the court (2006–2018), plus 2 concurrences. Most cited: Eureka Citizens for Responsible Government v. City of Eureka (71 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. 64 of these were attributed to Bruiniers 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	Eureka Citizens for Responsible Government v. City of Eureka	54 Cal. Rptr. 3d 485	71
2012	Tucker v. Pacific Bell Mobile Services†	208 Cal. App. 4th 201	59
2010	People v. Fenderson	188 Cal. App. 4th 625	58
2010	In Re Karla C.	186 Cal. App. 4th 1236	58
2016	Parisi v. Mazzaferro†	5 Cal. App. 5th 1219	57
2013	Almeda County Social Services Agency v. Shannon M.†	221 Cal. App. 4th 282	55
2009	Consumer Privacy Cases	175 Cal. App. 4th 545	55
2011	San Francisco Human Services Agency v. Felicia C.†	199 Cal. App. 4th 784	54
2011	Kelley v. The Conco Cos.†	196 Cal. App. 4th 191	52
2016	People v. Hall†	247 Cal. App. 4th 1255	45
2016	Tanguilig v. Bloomingdale's, Inc.†	5 Cal. App. 5th 665	41
2012	K.G. v. Meredith†	204 Cal. App. 4th 164	41
2010	People v. Reed	183 Cal. App. 4th 1137	40
2012	Gas v. City & County of San Francisco†	206 Cal. App. 4th 897	36
2014	Reynolds v. City of Calistoga†	223 Cal. App. 4th 865	35

Showing the 15 most-cited of 91 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 California Court of Appeal reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Terence Lee Bruiniers on?: Terence Lee Bruiniers was an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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