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 1959 / Served to 1983

Winslow Christian

Presiding Justice, California Court of Appeal

Winslow Christian was a Presiding Justice of the California Court of Appeal, who joined the court in 1959. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1959–1983 · 24 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1959	California Court of Appeal	–	–
1966	California Court of Appeal	–	–

Education

Stanford University
Stanford University

Judicial Record

In our data, Christian authored 384 published opinions for the court (1967–1983), plus 13 dissents and 3 concurrences. Most cited: Porten v. University of San Francisco (106 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. 73 of these were attributed to Christian 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
1976	Porten v. University of San Francisco	64 Cal. App. 3d 825	106
1980	Friends Of\	106 Cal. App. 3d 988	103
1977	O'HARA v. Western Seven Trees Corp.	75 Cal. App. 3d 798	77
1977	Kraus v. Willow Park Public Golf Course	73 Cal. App. 3d 354	73
1980	Heninger v. Dunn	101 Cal. App. 3d 858	71
1974	Niles v. City of San Rafael	42 Cal. App. 3d 230	65
1976	Newby v. Alto Riviera Apartments	60 Cal. App. 3d 288	64
1968	Zidell v. Bright	264 Cal. App. 2d 867	63
1971	Frame v. Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Inc.	20 Cal. App. 3d 668	60
1975	Lynch v. Glass	44 Cal. App. 3d 943	57
1975	San Francisco Ecology Center v. City & County of San Francisco	48 Cal. App. 3d 584	50
1967	Gong v. City of Fremont	250 Cal. App. 2d 568	46
1978	Sawyer v. Bank of America	83 Cal. App. 3d 135	45
1975	Rogers v. Ulrich	52 Cal. App. 3d 894	45
1982	People v. Rousseau	129 Cal. App. 3d 526	44

Showing the 15 most-cited of 400 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 Winslow Christian on?: Winslow Christian was a Presiding 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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24 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).