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

The court's current selection method is legislative election.

Court of Appeals of Virginia / Joined 1985 / Served to 1991

Marvin Frederick Cole

Judge, Court of Appeals of Virginia

Marvin Frederick Cole was a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Virginia, who joined the court in 1985. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1985–1991 · 6 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1985	Court of Appeals of Virginia	–	–

Education

University of Richmond
University of Richmond

Judicial Record

In our data, Cole authored 135 published opinions for the court (1985–2000), plus 12 dissents and 1 concurrence. Most cited: Ohree v. Commonwealth (729 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. 33 of these were attributed to Cole 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
1998	Ohree v. Commonwealth	494 S.E.2d 484	729
1988	Blain v. Commonwealth	371 S.E.2d 838	375
1986	Turner v. Commonwealth	341 S.E.2d 400	300
1991	Rollston v. Commonwealth	399 S.E.2d 823	287
1988	Servis v. Commonwealth	371 S.E.2d 156	274
1986	Pilot Freight Carriers, Inc. v. Reeves	339 S.E.2d 570	229
1990	Josephs v. Commonwealth· Separate†	390 S.E.2d 491	195
1986	Morris v. Badger Powhatan/Figgie International, Inc.	348 S.E.2d 876	189
1987	Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. v. Bateman	359 S.E.2d 98	184
1999	Francis v. Francis	518 S.E.2d 842	152
1986	Barkey v. COM., ALEXANDRIA DEPT. HUM. SERV.	347 S.E.2d 188	148
1987	Bowers v. Bowers	359 S.E.2d 546	132
1988	Iglesias v. Commonwealth	372 S.E.2d 170	117
1989	Limonja v. Commonwealth†	383 S.E.2d 476	101
1987	McGee v. Commonwealth	357 S.E.2d 738	98

Showing the 15 most-cited of 149 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 Court of Appeals of Virginia reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is legislative election.
Which court was Marvin Frederick Cole on?: Marvin Frederick Cole was a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Virginia.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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