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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Supreme Court of Pennsylvania / Joined 2016 / Active

Christine L. Donohue

Justice, Supreme Court of Pennsylvania

Christine L. Donohue is a Justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, serving since 2016. She previously served on the Superior Court of Pennsylvania. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2016 · 10 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2008	Superior Court of Pennsylvania	–	–
2016	Supreme Court of Pennsylvania	–	–

Education

East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania
Duquesne University

Judicial Record

In our data, Donohue authored 184 published opinions for the court (2008–2026), plus 42 dissents and 40 concurrences. Most cited: Commonwealth v. Flowers (617 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. 265 of these were attributed to Donohue 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
2015	Commonwealth v. Flowers†	113 A.3d 1246	617
2009	Commonwealth v. Ventura†	975 A.2d 1128	584
2013	M.J.M. v. M.L.G.†	63 A.3d 331	449
2014	Commonwealth v. Melvin†	103 A.3d 1	419
2009	In re I.J.†	972 A.2d 5	357
2011	J.R.M. v. J.E.A.†	33 A.3d 647	351
2014	Commonwealth v. Samuel†	102 A.3d 1001	335
2013	Commonwealth v. Baker†	72 A.3d 652	309
2015	Commonwealth v. Tyson· Dissent†	119 A.3d 353	303
2015	Commonwealth v. Tejada†	107 A.3d 788	302
2012	C.R.F. v. S.E.F†	45 A.3d 441	295
2017	Commonwealth v. Batts, Q., Aplt.†	163 A.3d 410	293
2016	Commonwealth v. Cox, J., Aplt.†	146 A.3d 221	292
2011	Commonwealth v. Brown†	23 A.3d 544	292
2011	E.D. v. M.P.†	33 A.3d 73	268

Showing the 15 most-cited of 266 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 Pennsylvania reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court is Christine L. Donohue on?: Christine L. Donohue is a Justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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