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 1985 / Served to 2017

Thomas E. Hollenhorst

Associate Justice, California Court of Appeal

Thomas E. Hollenhorst was an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal (89 judges, selected by merit selection with retention), who joined the court in 1985. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1985–2017 · 32 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1985	California Court of Appeal	–	–
1988	California Court of Appeal	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Hollenhorst authored 249 published opinions for the court (1988–2017), plus 3 dissents and 4 concurrences. Most cited: People v. Williams (358 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. 62 of these were attributed to Hollenhorst 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
2009	People v. Williams	170 Cal. App. 4th 587	358
2008	Laabs v. City of Victorville· Concurrence†	163 Cal. App. 4th 1242	217
2017	San Bernardino County Children & Family Services v. M.G.†	7 Cal. App. 5th 886	133
2017	People v. Lua†	10 Cal. App. 5th 1004	119
2010	People v. Garcia	185 Cal. App. 4th 1203	105
2006	Deveny v. ENTROPIN, INC.	42 Cal. Rptr. 3d 807	102
2005	People v. Thomas	30 Cal. Rptr. 3d 582	81
1990	Passavanti v. Williams	225 Cal. App. 3d 1602	81
2008	Baker v. Osborne Development Corp.	71 Cal. Rptr. 3d 854	77
2005	In Re Harmony B.	23 Cal. Rptr. 3d 207	77
1990	Summers v. City of Cathedral City	225 Cal. App. 3d 1047	68
1999	People v. Hove	91 Cal. Rptr. 2d 128	67
1992	Plenger v. Alza Corp.	11 Cal. App. 4th 349	66
1994	People v. Sword	29 Cal. App. 4th 614	61
1994	Ellenberger v. Espinosa	30 Cal. App. 4th 943	60

Showing the 15 most-cited of 256 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 Thomas E. Hollenhorst on?: Thomas E. Hollenhorst 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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32 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).