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 2014 / Active

Geraldine Hines

Justice, Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court

Geraldine Hines is a Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, serving since 2014. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1947 · age 79
Tenure: Since 2014 · 12 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2014	Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court	–	–

Education

Tougaloo College

Judicial Record

In our data, Hines authored 70 published opinions for the court (2014–2017), plus 2 dissents and 2 concurrences. Most cited: Commonwealth v. Kolenovic (137 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. 74 of these were attributed to Hines 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. Kolenovic†	471 Mass. 664	137
2016	Commonwealth v. Warren†	475 Mass. 530	102
2017	Commonwealth v. Meneus†	476 Mass. 231	65
2017	Commonwealth v. Barbosa†	477 Mass. 658	45
2017	Department of Revenue v. Lopez†	477 Mass. 268	42
2016	Commonwealth v. Durand†	475 Mass. 657	41
2017	Brangan v. Commonwealth†	477 Mass. 691	40
2016	Commonwealth v. Amado†	474 Mass. 147	40
2015	Commonwealth v. Hernandez†	473 Mass. 379	40
2017	Commonwealth v. Fulgiam†	477 Mass. 20	38
2016	Commonwealth v. Adonsoto†	475 Mass. 497	36
2015	Commonwealth v. Jessup†	471 Mass. 121	33
2015	Abate v. Fremont Investment & Loan†	470 Mass. 821	33
2016	Commonwealth v. Lally†	473 Mass. 693	30
2015	Deutsche Bank National Trust Co. v. Fitchburg Capital, LLC†	471 Mass. 248	30

Showing the 15 most-cited of 74 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 is Geraldine Hines on?: Geraldine Hines is a Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

Sources

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

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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).