How do judges of the Michigan Court of Appeals reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Michigan Court of Appeals / Joined 1965 / Served to 1974

John W. Fitzgerald

Judge, Michigan Court of Appeals

John W. Fitzgerald was a Judge of the Michigan Court of Appeals, who joined the court in 1965. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1965–1974 · 9 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1965	Michigan Court of Appeals	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Fitzgerald authored 406 published opinions for the court (1965–1974), plus 4 dissents and 2 concurrences. Most cited: Crawley v. Schick (104 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. 188 of these were attributed to Fitzgerald 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
1973	Crawley v. Schick	211 N.W.2d 217	104
1969	Romankewiz v. Black†	167 N.W.2d 606	46
1969	People v. Virgil Brown	167 N.W.2d 107	42
1967	People v. Wilson	155 N.W.2d 210	40
1967	People v. Wolfe	147 N.W.2d 447	38
1973	Kiefer v. May†	208 N.W.2d 539	35
1966	People v. Dickinson	141 N.W.2d 360	35
1968	Herman v. Theis	160 N.W.2d 365	34
1971	Cosby v. Pool†	194 N.W.2d 142	32
1968	Wayne County Prosecutor v. Doerfler	165 N.W.2d 648	32
1969	People v. Martinovich†	170 N.W.2d 899	31
1966	Williams v. Benson	141 N.W.2d 650	30
1965	Rice v. Jackson	134 N.W.2d 366	29
1974	People v. Jordan†	216 N.W.2d 71	28
1966	People v. Simpson	146 N.W.2d 828	28

Showing the 15 most-cited of 412 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 Michigan Court of Appeals reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was John W. Fitzgerald on?: John W. Fitzgerald was a Judge of the Michigan Court of Appeals.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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