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

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

Supreme Court of California / Joined 1915 / Served to 1926

William P. Lawlor

Justice, Supreme Court of California

William P. Lawlor was a Justice of the Supreme Court of California, who joined the court in 1915. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1854 · age 172
Tenure: 1915–1926 · 11 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1915	Supreme Court of California	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Lawlor authored 216 published opinions for the court (1915–1926), plus 28 dissents and 10 concurrences. Most cited: People v. Yeager (184 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. 7 of these were attributed to Lawlor 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
1924	People v. Yeager	229 P. 40	184
1923	See v. North American Accident Insurance· Concurrence	213 P. 42	152
1922	Mar Shee v. Maryland Assurance Corp.· Dissent	210 P. 269	130
1925	In Re Haines	234 P. 883	128
1919	People v. Tom Woo	184 P. 389	124
1919	Scott v. Times-Mirror Co.	184 P. 672	109
1924	Estate of Baird	223 P. 974	94
1924	People v. Hinshaw	227 P. 156	90
1926	People v. Selby	245 P. 426	88
1915	People v. Robbins· Dissent	154 P. 317	86
1924	Harrington v. Superior Court	228 P. 15	74
1922	People v. Roe· Dissent	209 P. 560	73
1923	People v. Newell	221 P. 622	70
1917	Bryant v. Pacific Electric Railway Co.	164 P. 385	69
1922	Young v. Southern Pacific Co.· Dissent	210 P. 259	67

Showing the 15 most-cited of 254 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 California reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was William P. Lawlor on?: William P. Lawlor was a Justice of the Supreme Court of California.

Sources

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

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