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 1995 / Served to 2001

Michael J. Eakin

Judge, Superior Court of Pennsylvania

Michael J. Eakin was a Judge of the Superior Court of Pennsylvania, who joined the court in 1995. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1995–2001 · 6 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1995	Superior Court of Pennsylvania	–	–

Education

Franklin and Marshall College

Judicial Record

In our data, Eakin authored 175 published opinions for the court (1996–2002), plus 14 dissents and 8 concurrences. Most cited: Commonwealth v. Kenner (199 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. 74 of these were attributed to Eakin 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
2001	Commonwealth v. Kenner	784 A.2d 808	199
1996	Commonwealth v. Yager†	685 A.2d 1000	175
1998	Shiner v. Moriarty	706 A.2d 1228	139
2002	Commonwealth v. Hodges	789 A.2d 764	122
2001	Commonwealth v. Edrington	780 A.2d 721	99
1997	Commonwealth v. Nichols†	692 A.2d 181	82
2000	Commonwealth v. Palmer	751 A.2d 223	80
1998	Commonwealth v. Riley	715 A.2d 1131	74
1996	Commonwealth v. Heberling	678 A.2d 794	74
2001	Mount Olivet Tabernacle Church v. Edwin L. Wiegand Division	781 A.2d 1263	73
1999	Commonwealth v. Kling	731 A.2d 145	72
1996	Grom v. Burgoon†	672 A.2d 823	72
1999	Commonwealth v. Heidler· Dissent†	741 A.2d 213	71
2000	Commonwealth v. Fenton	750 A.2d 863	62
2000	Commonwealth v. Hess	745 A.2d 29	59

Showing the 15 most-cited of 197 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 was Michael J. Eakin on?: Michael J. Eakin was 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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6 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).