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 1990 / Served to 1998

Robert L. Karwacki

Justice, Supreme Court of Maryland

Robert L. Karwacki was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Maryland, who joined the court in 1990. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1933 · age 93
Tenure: 1990–1998 · 8 yrs

Judicial service

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

Judicial Record

In our data, Karwacki authored 126 published opinions for the court (1990–1998), plus 6 dissents. Most cited: Batson v. Shiflett (236 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. 132 of these were attributed to Karwacki 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
1992	Batson v. Shiflett†	602 A.2d 1191	236
1997	Merzbacher v. State†	697 A.2d 432	144
1992	Oken v. State†	612 A.2d 258	141
1996	Sheets v. Brethren Mutual Insurance· Dissent†	679 A.2d 540	137
1992	McMillian v. State†	600 A.2d 430	129
1994	Montgomery County v. Buckman†	636 A.2d 448	128
1994	State v. Bell†	638 A.2d 107	120
1996	Pavel Enterprises, Inc. v. AS Johnson Co., Inc.†	674 A.2d 521	100
1995	Grandison v. State†	341 Md. 175	97
1997	Scott v. Jenkins†	690 A.2d 1000	90
1992	Citaramanis v. Hallowell†	613 A.2d 964	90
1997	Bobo v. State†	697 A.2d 1371	86
1994	Evans v. State†	637 A.2d 117	84
1993	Stone v. Chicago Title Insurance†	624 A.2d 496	84
1997	In Re Tariq A-R-Y†	701 A.2d 691	81

Showing the 15 most-cited of 132 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 Robert L. Karwacki on?: Robert L. Karwacki 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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8 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).