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 1984 / Served to 1991

Fortunato Pedro Benavides

Justice, Court of Appeals of Texas

Fortunato Pedro Benavides was a Justice of the Court of Appeals of Texas, who joined the court in 1984. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1984–1991 · 7 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1984	Court of Appeals of Texas	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Benavides authored 454 published opinions for the court (1984–1991), plus 1 dissent and 1 concurrence. Most cited: State v. Benavides (128 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. 62 of these were attributed to Benavides 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
1989	State v. Benavides	772 S.W.2d 271	128
1991	MacCallum v. MacCallum	801 S.W.2d 579	116
1990	Hickey v. Couchman	797 S.W.2d 103	113
1991	Shearson Lehman Hutton, Inc. v. Tucker	806 S.W.2d 914	111
1990	Celotex Corp. v. Tate	797 S.W.2d 197	83
1990	Warrilow v. Norrell	791 S.W.2d 515	79
1990	Kotzur v. Kelly	791 S.W.2d 254	69
1989	Saldivar v. State	783 S.W.2d 265	69
1990	Wisenbarger v. Gonzales Warm Springs Rehabilitation Hospital, Inc.	789 S.W.2d 688	65
1988	Gandara v. Novasad	752 S.W.2d 740	65
1990	Mowbray v. State	788 S.W.2d 658	63
1991	Torres v. State	807 S.W.2d 884	61
1990	Reyna v. State	797 S.W.2d 189	61
1984	Spellman v. American Universal Investment Co.· Dissent†	687 S.W.2d 27	60
1991	Automobile Insurance Co. of Hartford Connecticut v. Davila	805 S.W.2d 897	59

Showing the 15 most-cited of 456 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 Fortunato Pedro Benavides on?: Fortunato Pedro Benavides 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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7 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).