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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Michigan Supreme Court / Joined 1982 / Served to 2015

Michael F. Cavanagh

Justice, Michigan Supreme Court

Michael F. Cavanagh was a Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1982. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1940 · age 86
Tenure: 1982–2015 · 32 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1982	Michigan Supreme Court	–	–

Education

University of Detroit Mercy

Judicial Record

In our data, Cavanagh authored 506 published opinions for the court (1983–2014), plus 260 dissents and 195 concurrences. Most cited: People v. Trakhtenberg (1,458 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. 492 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
2012	People v. Trakhtenberg†	493 Mich. 38	1,458
2013	People v. Hardy; People v. Glenn· Concurrence†	494 Mich. 430	1,181
2002	People v. LeBlanc· Dissent†	640 N.W.2d 246	1,001
2003	People v. Babcock· Concurrence†	666 N.W.2d 231	930
2000	People v. Carter· Dissent†	612 N.W.2d 144	856
1994	Skinner v. Square D Co.	516 N.W.2d 475	842
2000	People v. Nowack· Concurrence†	614 N.W.2d 78	817
1994	People v. Pickens· Concurrence†	521 N.W.2d 797	763
2005	Rory v. Continental Insurance· Dissent†	703 N.W.2d 23	747
2011	People v. Kowalski· Concurrence†	489 Mich. 488	681
1999	People v. Hoag	594 N.W.2d 57	674
2000	In Re Trejo Minors· Concurrence†	612 N.W.2d 407	668
2000	Robinson v. City of Detroit· Dissent†	613 N.W.2d 307	662
1998	People v. Lemmon· Concurrence†	576 N.W.2d 129	606
1993	People v. VanderVliet· Dissent†	508 N.W.2d 114	601

Showing the 15 most-cited of 961 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 Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Michael F. Cavanagh on?: Michael F. Cavanagh was a Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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