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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Superior Court of Pennsylvania / Joined 1997 / Served to 2010

Joan Orie Melvin

Judge, Superior Court of Pennsylvania

Joan Orie Melvin was a Judge of the Superior Court of Pennsylvania, who joined the court in 1997. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1997–2010 · 13 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1997	Superior Court of Pennsylvania	–	–

Education

University of Notre Dame
Duquesne University

Judicial Record

In our data, Melvin authored 222 published opinions for the court (1998–2009), plus 23 dissents and 16 concurrences. Most cited: Commonwealth v. Evans (933 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. 138 of these were attributed to Melvin 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	Commonwealth v. Evans†	901 A.2d 528	933
2006	Commonwealth v. Malovich	903 A.2d 1247	619
2006	Commonwealth v. Thur	906 A.2d 552	289
2003	Commonwealth v. Wilson†	825 A.2d 710	195
2008	Commonwealth v. B.D.G.†	959 A.2d 362	183
2004	Commonwealth v. Melendez-Rodriguez†	856 A.2d 1278	173
1999	Commonwealth v. Brown· Concurrence†	741 A.2d 726	160
2006	Commonwealth v. Lewis†	911 A.2d 558	151
2003	Eichman v. McKeon†	824 A.2d 305	142
2001	Commonwealth v. Marti†	779 A.2d 1177	138
2006	Smith v. Smith	904 A.2d 15	127
2008	Commonwealth v. Kemp· Concurrence†	961 A.2d 1247	122
2006	Commonwealth v. Tareila†	895 A.2d 1266	122
2000	Commonwealth v. Fish	752 A.2d 921	121
2001	Commonwealth v. McCauley†	797 A.2d 920	120

Showing the 15 most-cited of 261 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 Superior Court of Pennsylvania reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court was Joan Orie Melvin on?: Joan Orie Melvin was a Judge of the Superior 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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13 years on the Superior Court of Pennsylvania. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).