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 1926 / Served to 1940

William H. Waste

Justice, Supreme Court of California

William H. Waste was a Justice of the Supreme Court of California, who joined the court in 1926. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1868 · age 158
Tenure: 1926–1940 · 14 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1926	Supreme Court of California	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Waste authored 641 published opinions for the court (1921–1940), plus 14 dissents and 8 concurrences. Most cited: Drummey v. State Board of Funeral Directors & Embalmers (197 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. 62 of these were attributed to Waste 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
1939	Drummey v. State Board of Funeral Directors & Embalmers	13 Cal. 2d 75	197
1924	Treadwell v. Nickel	228 P. 25	178
1938	Wholesale Tobacco Dealers Bureau of Southern California, Inc. v. National Candy & Tobacco Co.	11 Cal. 2d 634	152
1935	Tulare Irrigation District v. Lindsay-Strathmore Irrigation District	3 Cal. 2d 489	150
1930	People v. Howard	295 P. 333	143
1936	Max Factor & Co. v. Kunsman	5 Cal. 2d 446	142
1924	Newport v. Hatton	231 P. 987	123
1935	Meek v. Fowler	3 Cal. 2d 420	110
1935	In Re Lavine	2 Cal. 2d 324	107
1938	Engstrom v. Auburn Automobile Sales Corp.	11 Cal. 2d 64	106
1928	Douglas v. Southern Pacific Co.	264 P. 237	103
1932	Consolidated Reservoir & Power Co. v. Scarborough	16 P.2d 268	100
1922	Akley v. Bassett	209 P. 576	100
1929	People v. Kelley	281 P. 609	98
1923	Taylor v. Taylor	218 P. 756	98

Showing the 15 most-cited of 663 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 H. Waste on?: William H. Waste was a Justice of the Supreme Court of California.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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14 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).