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 1996 / Served to 2006

Russell M. Nigro

Justice, Supreme Court of Pennsylvania

Russell M. Nigro was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, who joined the court in 1996. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1946 · age 80
Tenure: 1996–2006 · 10 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1996	Supreme Court of Pennsylvania	–	–

Education

Temple University
Rutgers University-New Brunswick

Judicial Record

In our data, Nigro authored 188 published opinions for the court (1996–2005), plus 137 dissents and 135 concurrences. Most cited: Commonwealth v. Lord (1,456 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. 459 of these were attributed to Nigro 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
1998	Commonwealth v. Lord†	719 A.2d 306	1,456
2002	Commonwealth v. Mouzon†	812 A.2d 617	702
1998	Commonwealth v. Albrecht· Concurrence†	720 A.2d 693	654
2003	Commonwealth v. Robinson· Concurrence†	837 A.2d 1157	552
1999	Madison Construction Co. v. Harleysville Mutual Insurance· Dissent†	735 A.2d 100	547
2000	Commonwealth v. Lark· Concurrence†	746 A.2d 585	546
2003	Commonwealth v. Bomar· Concurrence†	826 A.2d 831	478
2005	Commonwealth v. Chmiel· Concurrence†	889 A.2d 501	431
2000	Commonwealth v. Strickler· Dissent†	757 A.2d 884	408
2004	Yocca v. Pittsburgh Steelers Sports, Inc.†	854 A.2d 425	398
1998	Hoy v. Angelone· Concurrence†	720 A.2d 745	395
2000	Commonwealth v. Murray†	753 A.2d 201	369
2000	Harman Ex Rel. Harman v. Borah· Concurrence†	756 A.2d 1116	354
1999	Commonwealth v. Allen· Dissent†	732 A.2d 582	279
2000	Crouse v. Cyclops Industries†	745 A.2d 606	270

Showing the 15 most-cited of 460 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 Russell M. Nigro on?: Russell M. Nigro 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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10 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).