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 1971 / Served to 1996

William H. Erickson

Justice, Colorado Supreme Court

William H. Erickson was a Justice of the Colorado Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1971. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1924–2010
Tenure: 1971–1996 · 25 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1971	Colorado Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Colorado School of Mines

Judicial Record

In our data, Erickson authored 1,094 published opinions for the court (1971–1996), plus 171 dissents and 138 concurrences. Most cited: People v. Rodriguez (1,618 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. 626 of these were attributed to Erickson 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
1996	People v. Rodriguez	914 P.2d 230	1,618
1982	People v. Constant	645 P.2d 843	845
1985	People v. Medina· Dissent†	705 P.2d 961	652
1979	Page v. Clark	592 P.2d 792	590
1994	M.D.C./Wood, Inc. v. Mortimer†	866 P.2d 1380	587
1984	People v. Curtis· Concurrence†	681 P.2d 504	530
1973	People v. Bennett†	183 Colo. 125	521
1984	People v. Wilder	687 P.2d 451	506
1989	People v. Zapata	779 P.2d 1307	422
1990	People v. Rodriguez	794 P.2d 965	410
1984	Mission Denver Co. v. Pierson	674 P.2d 363	409
1991	People v. Garcia· Dissent†	815 P.2d 937	405
1988	People v. Cagle	751 P.2d 614	400
1991	In Re Marriage of Jones	812 P.2d 1152	385
1986	Buckmiller v. Safeway Stores, Inc.· Dissent†	727 P.2d 1112	377

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,403 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 H. Erickson on?: William H. Erickson 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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25 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).