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 1988 / Active

Mark J. Cavanagh

Judge, Michigan Court of Appeals

Mark J. Cavanagh is a Judge of the Michigan Court of Appeals, serving since 1988. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 1988 · 38 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1988	Michigan Court of Appeals	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Cavanagh authored 124 published opinions for the court (1989–2018), plus 13 dissents and 14 concurrences. Most cited: People v. Avant (313 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. 142 of these were attributed to Cavanagh 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
1999	People v. Avant†	597 N.W.2d 864	313
2000	In re Terry†	240 Mich. App. 14	239
1998	People v. Plummer	581 N.W.2d 753	145
1998	Brenner v. Kolk†	573 N.W.2d 65	105
2009	Hastings Mutual Insurance v. Safety King, Inc.†	778 N.W.2d 275	90
1999	People v. Lester†	591 N.W.2d 267	89
1997	Schadewald v. Brule†	570 N.W.2d 788	87
2000	Churchman v. Richerson· Concurrence†	611 N.W.2d 333	84
1999	Rembert v. Ryan’s Family Steak Houses, Inc· Dissent†	596 N.W.2d 208	79
2001	Etefia v. Credit Technologies, Inc†	628 N.W.2d 577	67
2006	In Re AMAC†	711 N.W.2d 426	64
2002	Lamp v. Reynolds†	645 N.W.2d 311	63
2009	People v. Henderson†	765 N.W.2d 619	59
1995	Johnson v. Wayne County· Concurrence†	540 N.W.2d 66	59
2000	Persichini v. William Beaumont Hospital†	607 N.W.2d 100	55

Showing the 15 most-cited of 151 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 is Mark J. Cavanagh on?: Mark J. Cavanagh is 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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38 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).