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 2010 / Active

Paula Francisco Ott

Judge, Superior Court of Pennsylvania

Paula Francisco Ott is a Judge of the Superior Court of Pennsylvania, serving since 2010. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2010 · 16 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2010	Superior Court of Pennsylvania	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Ott authored 82 published opinions for the court (2010–2019), plus 4 dissents and 7 concurrences. Most cited: Commonwealth v. Orie (176 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. 91 of these were attributed to Ott 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
2014	Commonwealth v. Orie†	88 A.3d 983	176
2015	Com. v. Ruiz, J., Jr.†	131 A.3d 54	147
2017	Commonwealth v. Smith†	164 A.3d 1255	131
2015	Commonwealth v. Bennett†	124 A.3d 327	127
2013	Commonwealth v. Luster· Concurrence†	71 A.3d 1029	104
2013	Ferko-Fox v. Fox· Dissent†	68 A.3d 917	99
2018	Commonwealth v. McClellan· Concurrence†	178 A.3d 874	87
2015	Commonwealth v. Rogal†	120 A.3d 994	79
2013	Walton v. Johnson†	66 A.3d 782	77
2016	Commonwealth v. Plunkett†	151 A.3d 1108	70
2017	Commonwealth v. Rivera†	154 A.3d 370	56
2016	Commonwealth v. Diaz†	152 A.3d 1040	55
2015	Reinoso, G. v. Heritage Warminster SPE· Dissent†	108 A.3d 80	54
2017	Century Indemnity Co. v. OneBeacon Insurance Co.†	173 A.3d 784	52
2019	Com. v. Torres, W.	223 A.3d 715	50

Showing the 15 most-cited of 93 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 Paula Francisco Ott on?: Paula Francisco Ott 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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16 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).