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

The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.

Supreme Court of Maryland / Joined 1977 / Served to 1991

Harry A. Cole

Justice, Supreme Court of Maryland

Harry A. Cole was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Maryland, who joined the court in 1977. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1921–1999
Tenure: 1977–1991 · 14 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1977	Supreme Court of Maryland	–	–

Education

Morgan State University

Judicial Record

In our data, Cole authored 196 published opinions for the court (1978–1991), plus 34 dissents and 17 concurrences. Most cited: Tichnell v. State (300 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. 246 of these were attributed to Cole 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
1980	Tichnell v. State· Concurrence†	415 A.2d 830	300
1985	King v. Bankerd†	492 A.2d 608	259
1985	General Motors Acceptance Corp. v. Daniels†	492 A.2d 1306	233
1981	Williams v. State· Concurrence†	438 A.2d 1301	209
1986	Ashburn v. Anne Arundel County†	510 A.2d 1078	189
1985	Flaherty v. Weinberg†	492 A.2d 618	146
1982	Johnson v. State· Dissent†	439 A.2d 542	143
1989	State v. Faulkner· Dissent†	552 A.2d 896	137
1980	State v. Hutchinson†	411 A.2d 1035	131
1983	Hornbeck v. Somerset County Board of Education· Dissent†	458 A.2d 758	130
1988	Pennwalt Corp. v. Nasios†	550 A.2d 1155	121
1991	Snowden v. State†	583 A.2d 1056	113
1984	State v. Faulkner†	483 A.2d 759	109
1984	Trimble v. State†	478 A.2d 1143	108
1988	Simmons v. State	542 A.2d 1258	107

Showing the 15 most-cited of 247 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 Maryland reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Harry A. Cole on?: Harry A. Cole was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Maryland.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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