How do judges of the Court of Appeals of Virginia reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is legislative election.

Court of Appeals of Virginia / Joined 1997 / Served to 2005

Rudolph Bumgardner III

Judge, Court of Appeals of Virginia

Rudolph Bumgardner III was a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Virginia, who joined the court in 1997. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1997–2005 · 8 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1997	Court of Appeals of Virginia	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Bumgardner authored 76 published opinions for the court (1998–2009), plus 14 dissents and 4 concurrences. Most cited: Keselica v. Commonwealth (229 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. 32 of these were attributed to Bumgardner 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	Keselica v. Commonwealth	537 S.E.2d 611	229
2003	Robert W Szymczak, II v. Laura M Kane· Dissent†	41 Va. App. 365	113
2002	Pease v. Commonwealth	573 S.E.2d 272	103
2000	Luck v. Commonwealth	531 S.E.2d 41	97
2003	Gaines v. Commonwealth	574 S.E.2d 775	95
2000	Howell v. Howell	523 S.E.2d 514	93
2002	McCracken v. Commonwealth	572 S.E.2d 493	74
1999	Hunley v. Commonwealth	518 S.E.2d 347	67
2000	Graham v. Commonwealth	525 S.E.2d 567	63
2000	Hawthorne v. Smyth County Department of Social Services· Concurrence†	531 S.E.2d 639	51
2002	Leitao v. Commonwealth	573 S.E.2d 317	47
2000	Perkins v. Commonwealth	523 S.E.2d 512	44
1998	Ford v. Commonwealth	503 S.E.2d 803	44
1998	Gnadt v. Commonwealth	497 S.E.2d 887	42
1999	Washington v. Commonwealth†	29 Va. App. 5	41

Showing the 15 most-cited of 94 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 Court of Appeals of Virginia reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is legislative election.
Which court was Rudolph Bumgardner III on?: Rudolph Bumgardner III was a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Virginia.

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 Court of Appeals of Virginia. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).