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 2012 / Active

John T. Bender

Judge, Superior Court of Pennsylvania

John T. Bender is a Judge of the Superior Court of Pennsylvania, serving since 2012. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2012 · 14 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2012	Superior Court of Pennsylvania	–	–

Education

Duquesne University

Judicial Record

In our data, Bender authored 315 published opinions for the court (2002–2026), plus 16 dissents and 8 concurrences. Most cited: Commonwealth v. Henkel (554 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. 156 of these were attributed to Bender 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
2014	Commonwealth v. Henkel· Dissent†	90 A.3d 16	554
2008	Commonwealth v. Kalichak	943 A.2d 285	352
2016	Commonwealth v. Derry†	150 A.3d 987	274
2003	Commonwealth v. Reynolds	835 A.2d 720	255
2014	Commonwealth v. Thompson†	93 A.3d 478	245
2012	Commonwealth v. Lamonda· Dissent†	52 A.3d 365	241
2006	Commonwealth v. Friend	896 A.2d 607	238
2014	Commonwealth v. Vargas· Concurrence†	108 A.3d 858	219
2018	Commonwealth v. Murphy†	180 A.3d 402	199
2006	Commonwealth v. Ferguson	893 A.2d 735	198
2003	Commonwealth v. Bullick	830 A.2d 998	197
2015	Commonwealth v. Burton†	121 A.3d 1063	181
2014	Commonwealth v. Reed· Concurrence†	107 A.3d 137	177
2014	Commonwealth v. Davis†	86 A.3d 883	162
2018	Commonwealth v. Johnson†	180 A.3d 474	161

Showing the 15 most-cited of 339 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 is John T. Bender on?: John T. Bender is 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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14 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).