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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Washington Supreme Court / Joined 1979 / Served to 1985

William H. Williams

Justice, Washington Supreme Court

William H. Williams was a Justice of the Washington Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1979. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1921–2001
Tenure: 1979–1985 · 6 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1979	Washington Supreme Court	–	–

Education

University of Idaho
Gonzaga University

Judicial Record

In our data, Williams authored 98 published opinions for the court (1968–1985), plus 12 dissents and 10 concurrences. Most cited: Wilson v. Steinbach (937 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. 26 of these were attributed to Williams 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
1982	Wilson v. Steinbach	656 P.2d 1030	937
1980	State v. Delmarter· Dissent†	618 P.2d 99	583
1984	State v. Ryan	691 P.2d 197	344
1982	State v. White	640 P.2d 1061	340
1984	State v. Gore	681 P.2d 227	316
1983	State v. Hudlow	659 P.2d 514	308
1983	State v. McCullum	656 P.2d 1064	291
1983	Bender v. City of Seattle	664 P.2d 492	251
1980	State v. Simpson	622 P.2d 1199	247
1980	State v. Houser	622 P.2d 1218	235
1981	Mark v. Seattle Times	635 P.2d 1081	198
1981	State v. Hartzog	635 P.2d 694	177
1980	State v. Fain	617 P.2d 720	170
1984	State v. Acosta	683 P.2d 1069	168
1985	State v. Cord· Dissent†	693 P.2d 81	166

Showing the 15 most-cited of 120 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 Washington Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was William H. Williams on?: William H. Williams was a Justice of the Washington 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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6 years on the Washington Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).