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

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

Appellate Court of Maryland / Joined 2011 / Served to 2013

Shirley M. Watts

Judge, Appellate Court of Maryland

Shirley M. Watts was a Judge of the Appellate Court of Maryland, who joined the court in 2011. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 2011–2013 · 2 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2011	Appellate Court of Maryland	–	–

Education

Rutgers University-New Brunswick

Judicial Record

In our data, Watts authored 29 published opinions for the court (2011–2013), plus 1 dissent and 1 concurrence. Most cited: Dynacorp Ltd. v. Aramtel Ltd. (36 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. 30 of these were attributed to Watts 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
2012	Dynacorp Ltd. v. Aramtel Ltd.†	208 Md. App. 403	36
2012	Tig Insurance v. Monongahela Power Co.†	209 Md. App. 146	35
2012	Bacon v. Arey†	203 Md. App. 606	26
2011	Baltimore County v. Aecom Services, Inc.†	28 A.3d 11	21
2012	Montgomery v. State†	206 Md. App. 357	19
2012	TETSO v. State†	45 A.3d 788	11
2013	City Homes, Inc. v. Hazelwood†	210 Md. App. 615	10
2011	Cousar v. State†	18 A.3d 130	9
2012	McLaughlin v. Gill Simpson Electric†	206 Md. App. 242	8
2011	Alford v. State†	202 Md. App. 582	8
2012	Wood v. State†	209 Md. App. 246	7
2012	Ray v. State†	206 Md. App. 309	7
2012	CSX Transportation, Inc. v. Pitts†	38 A.3d 445	7
2013	Paul v. Blackburn Ltd. Partnership†	211 Md. App. 52	6
2012	Exxon Mobil Corp. v. Ford· Concurrence†	204 Md. App. 1	6

Showing the 15 most-cited of 31 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 Appellate Court of Maryland reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Shirley M. Watts on?: Shirley M. Watts was a Judge of the Appellate Court of Maryland.

Sources

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

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