How do judges of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.

Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court / Joined 1932 / Served to 1944

Charles Donahue

Justice, Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court

Charles Donahue was a Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, who joined the court in 1932. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1877–1952
Tenure: 1932–1944 · 12 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1932	Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court	–	–

Education

Dartmouth College

Judicial Record

In our data, Donahue authored 271 published opinions for the court (1932–1958), plus 1 dissent. Most cited: Menici v. Orton Crane & Shovel Co. (74 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. 271 of these were attributed to Donahue 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
1934	Menici v. Orton Crane & Shovel Co.†	285 Mass. 499	74
1940	Sandler v. Commonwealth Station Co.†	307 Mass. 470	69
1937	Gibbons v. Denoncourt†	297 Mass. 448	67
1937	Santa Maria v. Trotto†	297 Mass. 442	56
1933	Mt. Holyoke Realty Corp. v. Holyoke Realty Corp.†	284 Mass. 100	56
1933	Geo. W. Wilcox, Inc. v. Shell Eastern Petroleum Products, Inc.†	283 Mass. 383	55
1940	Barry v. Sparks†	306 Mass. 80	52
1934	Rezendes v. Prudential Insurance Co. of America†	285 Mass. 505	52
1933	Commonwealth v. Vellucci†	284 Mass. 443	52
1934	Malloy v. Carroll†	287 Mass. 376	51
1933	Semerjian v. Stetson†	284 Mass. 510	51
1933	Commonwealth v. Chin Kee†	283 Mass. 248	51
1937	Johnson v. Kanavos†	296 Mass. 373	50
1936	Morse v. Homer's Inc.†	295 Mass. 606	48
1934	Topor v. Topor†	287 Mass. 473	46

Showing the 15 most-cited of 272 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 Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is gubernatorial appointment.
Which court was Charles Donahue on?: Charles Donahue was a Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

See something wrong? Report an error. Fixes are logged in the corrections log.

12 years on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).