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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Court of Appeals of Texas / Joined 2002 / Served to 2012

Elsa Alcala

Justice, Court of Appeals of Texas

Elsa Alcala was a Justice of the Court of Appeals of Texas, who joined the court in 2002. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 2002–2012 · 10 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2002	Court of Appeals of Texas	–	–

Education

Texas A & M University-College Station

Judicial Record

In our data, Alcala authored 208 published opinions for the court (2002–2011), plus 10 dissents and 2 concurrences. Most cited: Mitchell v. State (407 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. 24 of these were attributed to Alcala 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
2006	Mitchell v. State	193 S.W.3d 153	407
2010	Jordan v. Dossey	325 S.W.3d 700	390
2011	Ervin v. State	331 S.W.3d 49	254
2008	James v. State	264 S.W.3d 215	157
2005	Brookshire Brothers, Inc. v. Smith	176 S.W.3d 30	154
2006	Blackwell v. State	193 S.W.3d 1	139
2005	Cleveland v. State	177 S.W.3d 374	136
2007	Scott v. Gallagher	209 S.W.3d 262	135
2004	C.M. Asfahl Agency v. Tensor Inc.	135 S.W.3d 768	133
2003	In Re Moers	104 S.W.3d 609	128
2006	Arreola v. State	207 S.W.3d 387	119
2005	Carroll v. State	176 S.W.3d 249	119
2003	Keller v. State	125 S.W.3d 600	114
2003	Roventini v. Ocular Sciences, Inc.	111 S.W.3d 719	101
2004	Nhem v. State	129 S.W.3d 696	98

Showing the 15 most-cited of 220 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 Court of Appeals of Texas reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court was Elsa Alcala on?: Elsa Alcala was a Justice of the Court of Appeals of Texas.

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