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

Kate Ford Elliott

Judge, Superior Court of Pennsylvania

Kate Ford Elliott 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, Elliott authored 481 published opinions for the court (1990–2026), plus 13 dissents and 8 concurrences. Most cited: Commonwealth v. Newman (623 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. 120 of these were attributed to Elliott 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. Newman†	99 A.3d 86	623
2012	Commonwealth v. Wah†	42 A.3d 335	382
2002	Etoll, Inc. v. Elias/Savion Advertising, Inc.	811 A.2d 10	381
2013	Commonwealth v. Hopkins†	67 A.3d 817	268
2014	Commonwealth v. Vargas· Concurrence†	108 A.3d 858	219
2002	Commonwealth v. Heggins	809 A.2d 908	193
2002	In Re Adoption of A.C.H.	803 A.2d 224	186
2011	Commonwealth v. Orr· Dissent†	38 A.3d 868	172
2010	Commonwealth v. Gonzalez-Dejusus†	994 A.2d 595	164
2013	Commonwealth v. Stokes†	78 A.3d 644	162
2010	Commonwealth v. Franklin†	990 A.2d 795	159
2012	Commonwealth v. Son Truong†	36 A.3d 592	143
2014	Commonwealth v. Kinard†	95 A.3d 279	137
1997	Commonwealth v. Yanoff	690 A.2d 260	135
2017	Commonwealth v. Orlando†	156 A.3d 1274	131

Showing the 15 most-cited of 502 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 Kate Ford Elliott on?: Kate Ford Elliott 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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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).