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 1959 / Served to 1965

Wilfred Chomatsu Tsukiyama

Justice, Supreme Court of Hawaii

Wilfred Chomatsu Tsukiyama was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Hawaii, who joined the court in 1959. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1897–1965
Tenure: 1959–1965 · 6 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1959	Supreme Court of Hawaii	–	–

Education

Coe College

Judicial Record

In our data, Tsukiyama authored 106 published opinions for the court (1959–1965), plus 6 dissents. Most cited: State v. Pokini (76 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. 12 of these were attributed to Tsukiyama 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
1961	State v. Pokini	367 P.2d 499	76
1961	Mitchell v. Branch	363 P.2d 969	60
1962	Midkiff v. Castle & Cooke, Inc.	368 P.2d 887	54
1962	Peine v. Murphy	377 P.2d 708	52
1962	Inter-Island Resorts, Ltd. v. Akahane	377 P.2d 715	52
1961	State v. Sacoco†	367 P.2d 11	51
1960	Ferreira v. Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Ltd.	356 P.2d 651	51
1962	State v. Evans	372 P.2d 365	47
1963	Young v. Price	388 P.2d 203	44
1963	In Re the Estate of Campbell	382 P.2d 920	44
1960	GODOY ETC. v. Hawaii County	354 P.2d 78	39
1962	Stafford v. Dickison	374 P.2d 665	36
1963	State v. Arena	379 P.2d 594	35
1960	State v. Foster	354 P.2d 960	35
1965	Bulatao v. Kauai Motors, Ltd.	406 P.2d 887	33

Showing the 15 most-cited of 112 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 Wilfred Chomatsu Tsukiyama on?: Wilfred Chomatsu Tsukiyama 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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6 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).