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

The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.

Supreme Court of Maryland / Joined 1979 / Served to 1984

Rita C. Davidson

Justice, Supreme Court of Maryland

Rita C. Davidson was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Maryland, who joined the court in 1979. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1928–1984
Tenure: 1979–1984 · 5 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1979	Supreme Court of Maryland	–	–

Education

Goucher College
Yale University

Judicial Record

In our data, Davidson authored 85 published opinions for the court (1979–1984), plus 39 dissents and 11 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Hicks (250 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. 135 of these were attributed to Davidson 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
1979	State v. Hicks· Dissent†	403 A.2d 356	250
1984	MacK v. State†	479 A.2d 1344	168
1983	Pierce v. Johns-Manville Sales Corp.†	464 A.2d 1020	160
1984	State v. Frazier· Dissent†	470 A.2d 1269	159
1983	Harrison v. Montgomery County Board of Education· Dissent†	456 A.2d 894	148
1981	Schultz v. Pritts†	432 A.2d 1319	132
1980	Pennsylvania National Mutual Casualty Insurance v. Gartelman†	416 A.2d 734	127
1984	Little v. State· Dissent†	479 A.2d 903	125
1983	Calhoun v. State· Dissent†	468 A.2d 45	119
1984	Stebbing v. State· Dissent†	473 A.2d 903	115
1984	Trimble v. State· Dissent†	478 A.2d 1143	108
1983	Tichnell v. State· Dissent†	468 A.2d 1	106
1982	Harper v. Harper†	448 A.2d 916	106
1979	Attorney General v. Anne Arundel County School Bus Contractors Ass'n†	286 Md. 324	100
1983	Poole v. State· Concurrence†	453 A.2d 1218	99

Showing the 15 most-cited of 135 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 Maryland reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Rita C. Davidson on?: Rita C. Davidson was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Maryland.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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