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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Supreme Court of Pennsylvania / Joined 1931 / Served to 1952

James B. Drew

Justice, Supreme Court of Pennsylvania

James B. Drew was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, who joined the court in 1931. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1877–1953
Tenure: 1931–1952 · 21 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1931	Supreme Court of Pennsylvania	–	–

Education

Columbia University in the City of New York

Judicial Record

In our data, Drew authored 788 published opinions for the court (1852–1952), plus 43 dissents and 6 concurrences. Most cited: Nanty-Glo Boro. v. American Surety Co. (466 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. 93 of these were attributed to Drew 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
1932	Nanty-Glo Boro. v. American Surety Co.	163 A. 523	466
1942	Commonwealth Ex Rel. Banks v. Cain· Dissent	28 A.2d 897	156
1936	Evans v. Penn Mutual Life Insurance	186 A. 133	154
1932	Lacey v. Washburn & Williams Co.	164 A. 724	116
1933	Clayton v. Lienhard	167 A. 321	115
1938	Holgate Bros. v. Bashore†	331 Pa. 255	106
1935	Thompson v. Peck	181 A. 597	103
1932	Byrne v. Schultz (Stone)	160 A. 125	96
1936	Harris (Et Ux.) v. Lewistown Tr. Co.	191 A. 34	90
1941	Freedman v. Mutual Life Insurance Co. of New York	21 A.2d 81	83
1946	Commonwealth v. Bausewine	46 A.2d 491	82
1935	Koontz v. Messer & Quaker State Oil Refining Co.	181 A. 792	79
1935	Brower v. Employers' Liability Assurance Co.· Concurrence	177 A. 826	76
1938	Blauner's, Inc. v. Philadelphia	198 A. 889	74
1935	Byrne's Estate	181 A. 500	74

Showing the 15 most-cited of 838 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 Pennsylvania reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court was James B. Drew on?: James B. Drew was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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