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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Michigan Court of Appeals / Joined 1975 / Served to 1982

Michael F. Cavanagh

Judge, Michigan Court of Appeals

Michael F. Cavanagh was a Judge of the Michigan Court of Appeals, who joined the court in 1975. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1975–1982 · 7 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1975	Michigan Court of Appeals	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Cavanagh authored 236 published opinions for the court (1975–1982), plus 48 dissents and 18 concurrences. Most cited: Schipani v. Ford Motor Co. (135 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. 216 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
1981	Schipani v. Ford Motor Co.†	302 N.W.2d 307	135
1977	International Business MacHines Corp. v. Department of Treasury†	255 N.W.2d 702	51
1982	Boyd v. Boyd· Concurrence†	323 N.W.2d 553	49
1976	Mumrow v. Riddle†	242 N.W.2d 489	45
1982	People v. David†	326 N.W.2d 485	42
1975	Kermans v. Pendleton	233 N.W.2d 658	41
1975	Paige v. Bing Construction Co.†	233 N.W.2d 46	39
1975	People v. McCartney†	231 N.W.2d 472	38
1980	People v. Jones	296 N.W.2d 268	37
1980	People v. Harris	291 N.W.2d 97	35
1980	Vargo v. Svitchan†	301 N.W.2d 1	33
1979	People v. Izzo· Dissent†	282 N.W.2d 10	33
1981	Williams v. O'CONNOR	310 N.W.2d 825	32
1978	People v. Ricky Smith· Concurrence†	270 N.W.2d 697	32
1982	People v. O'BRIEN· Dissent†	317 N.W.2d 570	31

Showing the 15 most-cited of 302 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 Court of Appeals reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Michael F. Cavanagh on?: Michael F. Cavanagh was a Judge of the Michigan Court of Appeals.

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.

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