How do judges of the Supreme Court of Maryland reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.

Supreme Court of Maryland / Joined 2008 / Former Justice

Mary Ellen Barbera

Justice, Supreme Court of Maryland

Mary Ellen Barbera was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Maryland (7 judges, selected by merit selection with retention), who joined the court in 2008. She previously served on the Appellate Court of Maryland. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1951 · age 75
Tenure: 2008 · 18 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2002	Appellate Court of Maryland	–	–
2008	Supreme Court of Maryland	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Barbera authored 258 published opinions for the court (2002–2021), plus 9 dissents. Most cited: Robinson v. State (82 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. 168 of these were attributed to Barbera 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
2009	Robinson v. State†	976 A.2d 1072	82
2013	Doe v. Department of Public Safety & Correctional Services· Dissent†	430 Md. 535	77
2011	Frey v. Comptroller of the Treasury†	29 A.3d 475	76
2011	Gardner v. State†	20 A.3d 801	76
2012	Jones v. State†	425 Md. 1	75
2010	Ocean Petroleum, Co. v. Yanek†	5 A.3d 683	70
2011	Douglas v. State†	31 A.3d 250	65
2011	Lewis v. Waletzky†	31 A.3d 123	57
2011	Lee v. State†	12 A.3d 1238	57
2011	Montgomery County v. Deibler†	31 A.3d 191	54
2014	Attorney Grievance Commission v. Agbaje	438 Md. 695	50
2010	Cuffley v. State†	7 A.3d 557	47
2010	Appiah v. Hall†	7 A.3d 536	46
2013	Kendall v. Howard County†	431 Md. 590	45
2010	Schuele v. Case Handyman & Remodeling Services, LLC†	989 A.2d 210	45

Showing the 15 most-cited of 267 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 Supreme Court of Maryland reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Mary Ellen Barbera on?: Mary Ellen Barbera was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Maryland.

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.

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