How do judges of the Michigan Court of Appeals reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Michigan Court of Appeals / Joined 1989 / Served to 2008

Dennis Kolenda

Judge, Michigan Court of Appeals

Dennis Kolenda was a Judge of the Michigan Court of Appeals, who joined the court in 1989. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1989–2008 · 19 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1989	Michigan Court of Appeals	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Kolenda authored 1 published opinion for the court (1993–1995), plus 2 concurrences. Most cited: Johnson v. Wayne County (59 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. 3 of these were attributed to Kolenda 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
1995	Johnson v. Wayne County· Concurrence†	540 N.W.2d 66	59
1993	People v. Spivey· Concurrence†	509 N.W.2d 908	10
1994	People v. Doyle†	512 N.W.2d 59	6

Showing the 3 most-cited of 3 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 Michigan Court of Appeals reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Dennis Kolenda on?: Dennis Kolenda was a Judge of the Michigan Court of Appeals.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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