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 2012 / Active

Mary Janes Bowes

Judge, Superior Court of Pennsylvania

Mary Janes Bowes is a Judge of the Superior Court of Pennsylvania, serving since 2012. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2012 · 14 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2012	Superior Court of Pennsylvania	–	–

Education

Georgetown University

Judicial Record

In our data, Bowes authored 444 published opinions for the court (2002–2026), plus 8 dissents and 28 concurrences. Most cited: Commonwealth v. Cartrette (1,101 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. 254 of these were attributed to Bowes 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
2013	Commonwealth v. Cartrette†	83 A.3d 1030	1,101
2012	Commonwealth v. Ford†	44 A.3d 1190	887
2013	Commonwealth v. Taylor†	65 A.3d 462	800
2013	Commonwealth v. Dodge†	77 A.3d 1263	719
2012	Commonwealth v. Rykard†	55 A.3d 1177	631
2014	Commonwealth v. Henkel†	90 A.3d 16	554
2012	In re K.M.†	53 A.3d 781	474
2002	Commonwealth v. Griffin	804 A.2d 1	420
2013	Commonwealth v. Watley†	81 A.3d 108	414
2014	Commonwealth v. Rigg†	84 A.3d 1080	378
2013	Commonwealth v. Stewart†	84 A.3d 701	336
2019	Com. v. Stansbury, K.	219 A.3d 157	300
2015	Commonwealth v. Zeigler†	112 A.3d 656	279
2014	Commonwealth v. Wolfe· Concurrence†	106 A.3d 800	273
2014	Commonwealth v. Thompson· Concurrence†	106 A.3d 742	225

Showing the 15 most-cited of 480 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 Mary Janes Bowes on?: Mary Janes Bowes 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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14 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).