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 1919 / Served to 1940

John W. Kephart

Justice, Supreme Court of Pennsylvania

John W. Kephart was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, who joined the court in 1919. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1872–1944
Tenure: 1919–1940 · 21 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1919	Supreme Court of Pennsylvania	–	–

Education

Allegheny College

Judicial Record

In our data, Kephart authored 912 published opinions for the court (1919–1939), plus 31 dissents and 9 concurrences. Most cited: Wilson v. Philadelphia School District (235 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. 247 of these were attributed to Kephart 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
1937	Wilson v. Philadelphia School District	195 A. 90	235
1926	White's Appeal	134 A. 409	231
1936	McNair's Petition	187 A. 498	214
1938	Nixon v. Nixon	198 A. 154	213
1934	Mielcuszny Et Ux. v. Rosol (Et Ux.)	176 A. 236	203
1938	Madden v. Glosztonyi Savings & Trust Co.	200 A. 624	171
1930	McDonald v. Levinson Steel Co.	153 A. 424	160
1930	Fedas v. Insurance Co. of Pennsylvania	151 A. 285	159
1934	Retirement Board v. McGovern	174 A. 400	155
1931	Commonwealth v. Williams	160 A. 602	155
1927	Commonwealth v. Meyers	139 A. 374	146
1920	Kuca v. Lehigh Valley Coal Co.†	268 Pa. 163	139
1924	Commonwealth v. Myma†	278 Pa. 505	138
1932	Dorrance's Estate· Dissent	163 A. 303	136
1936	Kaczorowski v. Kalkosinski	184 A. 663	134

Showing the 15 most-cited of 956 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 John W. Kephart on?: John W. Kephart 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).