How do judges of the Colorado Supreme Court reach the bench?

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

Colorado Supreme Court / Joined 1879 / Served to 1889

William E. Beck

Justice, Colorado Supreme Court

William E. Beck was a Justice of the Colorado Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1879. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1879–1889 · 10 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1879	Colorado Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Beck authored 226 published opinions for the court (1879–1888), plus 4 dissents and 2 concurrences. Most cited: Wheeler v. Northern Colorado Irrigation Co. (66 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. 229 of these were attributed to Beck 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
1887	Wheeler v. Northern Colorado Irrigation Co.· Concurrence†	10 Colo. 582	66
1886	Daniels v. Daniels†	9 Colo. 133	66
1884	Toenniges v. Drake†	7 Colo. 471	55
1886	Bassinger v. Spangler†	9 Colo. 175	52
1887	Denver Circle R. v. Nestor†	10 Colo. 403	51
1884	Brown v. City of Denver†	7 Colo. 305	51
1879	Finnerty v. Fritz†	5 Colo. 174	47
1884	City of Denver v. Dunsmore†	7 Colo. 328	43
1886	Roberts v. People†	9 Colo. 458	41
1884	Wilcox v. Jackson†	7 Colo. 521	39
1884	Denver, South Park & Pacific R. R. v. Conway†	8 Colo. 1	36
1883	Tucker v. Parks†	7 Colo. 62	35
1885	People ex rel. Clement v. Spruance†	8 Colo. 307	34
1883	Dusing v. Nelson†	7 Colo. 184	34
1886	McMurtrie v. Riddell†	9 Colo. 497	33

Showing the 15 most-cited of 232 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 Colorado Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was William E. Beck on?: William E. Beck was a Justice of the Colorado Supreme Court.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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