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 1966 / Served to 1982

William Shaw Richardson

Justice, Supreme Court of Hawaii

William Shaw Richardson was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Hawaii, who joined the court in 1966. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1919–2010
Tenure: 1966–1982 · 16 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1966	Supreme Court of Hawaii	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Richardson authored 228 published opinions for the court (1966–1982), plus 15 dissents and 1 concurrence. Most cited: Leong Ex Rel. Petagno v. Takasaki (176 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. 185 of these were attributed to Richardson 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
1974	Leong Ex Rel. Petagno v. Takasaki†	520 P.2d 758	176
1969	Pickard v. City and County of Honolulu	452 P.2d 445	149
1980	State v. Antone†	615 P.2d 101	120
1970	Petersen Ex Rel. Petersen v. City & County of Honolulu†	462 P.2d 1007	118
1982	State v. Kim†	645 P.2d 1330	112
1982	State v. Moriwake†	647 P.2d 705	109
1978	State v. Kaaheena†	575 P.2d 462	84
1978	Kang v. Harrington	587 P.2d 285	80
1970	State v. Rocker†	475 P.2d 684	76
1982	Robinson v. Ariyoshi	658 P.2d 287	71
1981	Waugh v. University of Hawaii†	621 P.2d 957	68
1979	State v. Vance	602 P.2d 933	68
1977	State v. Stachler†	570 P.2d 1323	68
1968	Abraham v. S. E. Onorato Garages	446 P.2d 821	64
1978	State v. McNulty†	588 P.2d 438	63

Showing the 15 most-cited of 244 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 William Shaw Richardson on?: William Shaw Richardson 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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16 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).