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 2010 / Active

Judith Ference Olson

Judge, Superior Court of Pennsylvania

Judith Ference Olson is a Judge of the Superior Court of Pennsylvania, serving since 2010. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2010 · 16 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2010	Superior Court of Pennsylvania	–	–

Education

Duquesne University

Judicial Record

In our data, Olson authored 263 published opinions for the court (2010–2026), plus 8 dissents and 10 concurrences. Most cited: Commonwealth v. Butler (372 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. 148 of these were attributed to Olson 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
2017	Commonwealth v. Butler†	173 A.3d 1212	372
2014	Commonwealth v. Callahan†	101 A.3d 118	293
2012	Commonwealth v. Doty†	48 A.3d 451	249
2012	Commonwealth v. Bowen†	55 A.3d 1254	246
2014	Commonwealth v. Trinidad†	96 A.3d 1031	239
2014	Commonwealth v. Vargas†	108 A.3d 858	219
2016	Commonwealth v. Brown†	141 A.3d 491	192
2018	Com. of Pa. v. Montgomery†	181 A.3d 359	191
2015	Commonwealth v. Burton· Dissent†	121 A.3d 1063	181
2016	Commonwealth v. Evans†	153 A.3d 323	165
2015	Commonwealth v. Tyack†	128 A.3d 254	151
2013	Commonwealth v. Huggins†	68 A.3d 962	140
2013	Commonwealth v. Michaud†	70 A.3d 862	135
2012	Commonwealth v. Bricker†	41 A.3d 872	135
2013	Commonwealth v. Clemens†	66 A.3d 373	132

Showing the 15 most-cited of 281 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 Judith Ference Olson on?: Judith Ference Olson 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

See something wrong? Report an error. Fixes are logged in the corrections log.

16 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).