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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Supreme Court of Pennsylvania / Joined 1990 / Served to 2008

Ralph J. Cappy

Justice, Supreme Court of Pennsylvania

Ralph J. Cappy was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, who joined the court in 1990. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1943–2009
Tenure: 1990–2008 · 18 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1990	Supreme Court of Pennsylvania	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Cappy authored 413 published opinions for the court (1990–2008), plus 128 dissents and 188 concurrences. Most cited: Commonwealth v. Widmer (1,854 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. 704 of these were attributed to Cappy 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
2000	Commonwealth v. Widmer†	744 A.2d 745	1,854
2002	Commonwealth v. Grant†	813 A.2d 726	1,205
1999	Commonwealth v. Fahy†	737 A.2d 214	1,072
2007	Commonwealth v. Walls†	926 A.2d 957	918
1991	Commonwealth v. Edmunds†	586 A.2d 887	776
1998	Commonwealth v. Albrecht†	720 A.2d 693	654
1999	Madison Construction Co. v. Harleysville Mutual Insurance· Dissent†	735 A.2d 100	547
2000	Commonwealth v. Lark†	746 A.2d 585	546
1995	Commonwealth v. Travaglia†	661 A.2d 352	541
2005	Fine v. Checcio†	870 A.2d 850	495
2006	Commonwealth v. Chester†	895 A.2d 520	452
2006	Kvaerner Metals Division of Kvaerner US, Inc. v. Commercial Union Insurance Company	908 A.2d 888	424
1998	Commonwealth v. Abu-Jamal†	720 A.2d 79	410
2006	Commonwealth v. Spotz· Concurrence†	896 A.2d 1191	402
1998	Hoy v. Angelone†	720 A.2d 745	395

Showing the 15 most-cited of 729 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 Supreme Court of Pennsylvania reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court was Ralph J. Cappy on?: Ralph J. Cappy was a Justice of the Supreme 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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18 years on the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).