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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Court of Appeals of Texas / Joined 2001 / Active

Molly Francis

Justice, Court of Appeals of Texas

Molly Francis is a Justice of the Court of Appeals of Texas, serving since 2001. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2001 · 24 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2001	Court of Appeals of Texas	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Francis authored 241 published opinions for the court (2002–2018). Most cited: Bolling v. Farmers Branch Independent School District (281 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. 106 of these were attributed to Francis 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
2010	Bolling v. Farmers Branch Independent School District	315 S.W.3d 893	281
2006	Huey v. Huey	200 S.W.3d 851	212
2013	Coronel, Israel v. State†	416 S.W.3d 550	179
2004	Brown v. Brown	145 S.W.3d 745	135
2013	Franklin, Sugar Ray v. State†	402 S.W.3d 894	122
2003	In Re the Interest of R.F.†	115 S.W.3d 804	91
2007	Paragon General Contractors, Inc. v. Larco Construction Inc.	227 S.W.3d 876	87
2007	City of Farmers Branch v. Ramos†	235 S.W.3d 462	70
2006	Long v. Long†	196 S.W.3d 460	70
2006	Emerson Electric Co. v. American Permanent Ware Co.†	201 S.W.3d 301	63
2004	Devine v. Dallas County	130 S.W.3d 512	60
2007	Mood v. Kronos Products, Inc.	245 S.W.3d 8	59
2005	Carender v. State†	155 S.W.3d 929	57
2007	Tracy v. Tracy†	219 S.W.3d 527	56
2011	Hoss v. Alardin	338 S.W.3d 635	51

Showing the 15 most-cited of 241 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 Court of Appeals of Texas reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court is Molly Francis on?: Molly Francis is a Justice of the Court of Appeals of Texas.

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.

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