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 1994 / Served to 2014

Ronald D. Castille

Justice, Supreme Court of Pennsylvania

Ronald D. Castille was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, who joined the court in 1994. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1944 · age 82
Tenure: 1994–2014 · 20 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1994	Supreme Court of Pennsylvania	–	–

Education

Auburn University

Judicial Record

In our data, Castille authored 482 published opinions for the court (1994–2014), plus 196 dissents and 241 concurrences. Most cited: Commonwealth v. Santiago (1,639 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. 815 of these were attributed to Castille 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
2009	Commonwealth v. Santiago†	978 A.2d 349	1,639
2002	Commonwealth v. Grant· Concurrence†	813 A.2d 726	1,205
2009	Commonwealth v. Johnson†	966 A.2d 523	958
2014	Commonwealth v. Fears· Concurrence†	86 A.3d 795	803
2010	Commonwealth v. Albrecht	994 A.2d 1091	770
2011	Commonwealth v. Spotz	18 A.3d 244	764
2013	Commonwealth v. Holmes†	79 A.3d 562	731
2002	Commonwealth v. Mouzon· Dissent†	812 A.2d 617	702
2010	Commonwealth v. Ali	10 A.3d 282	675
2009	Commonwealth v. Pitts· Concurrence†	981 A.2d 875	622
2003	Commonwealth v. Champney†	832 A.2d 403	563
2003	Commonwealth v. Robinson†	837 A.2d 1157	552
1995	Commonwealth v. Starr†	664 A.2d 1326	545
1999	Commonwealth v. Kimball· Concurrence†	724 A.2d 326	512
2013	Commonwealth v. Roney· Concurrence†	79 A.3d 595	496

Showing the 15 most-cited of 919 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 Ronald D. Castille on?: Ronald D. Castille 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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20 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).