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 1988 / Served to 1993

William A. Masterson

Justice, California Court of Appeal

William A. Masterson was a Justice of the California Court of Appeal, who joined the court in 1988. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1988–1993 · 4 yrs

Judicial service

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

Judicial Record

In our data, Masterson authored 62 published opinions for the court (1993–2000). Most cited: Jackson v. County of Los Angeles (217 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. 1 of these was attributed to Masterson 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
1997	Jackson v. County of Los Angeles	60 Cal. App. 4th 171	217
1998	Exxess Electronixx v. Heger Realty Corp.	75 Cal. Rptr. 2d 376	112
1996	Clark v. City of Hermosa Beach	48 Cal. App. 4th 1152	105
1999	Brown v. Boren	88 Cal. Rptr. 2d 758	94
1995	Camp v. Jeffer, Mangels, Butler & Marmaro	35 Cal. App. 4th 620	93
1997	Sada v. Robert F. Kennedy Medical Center	56 Cal. App. 4th 138	92
1995	Hambrecht & Quist Venture Partners v. American Medical International, Inc.	38 Cal. App. 4th 1532	85
1999	Hanson v. Grode	90 Cal. Rptr. 2d 396	75
1999	Lagatree v. Luce, Forward, Hamilton & Scripps LLP	88 Cal. Rptr. 2d 664	71
2000	Truck Insurance Exchange v. Unigard Insurance	94 Cal. Rptr. 2d 516	60
1997	People v. Bishop	56 Cal. App. 4th 1245	53
1995	Shoemaker v. County of Los Angeles	37 Cal. App. 4th 618	52
1997	Lindenstadt v. Staff Builders, Inc.	55 Cal. App. 4th 882	50
1995	Schlessinger v. Rosenfelds, Meyer & Susman	40 Cal. App. 4th 1096	46
1996	Mohilef v. Janovici	51 Cal. App. 4th 267	43

Showing the 15 most-cited of 62 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 William A. Masterson on?: William A. Masterson was a 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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4 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).