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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Michigan Court of Appeals / Joined 1965 / Served to 1969

Thomas Giles Kavanagh

Judge, Michigan Court of Appeals

Thomas Giles Kavanagh was a Judge of the Michigan Court of Appeals, who joined the court in 1965. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1965–1969 · 4 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1965	Michigan Court of Appeals	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Kavanagh authored 147 published opinions for the court (1965–1988), plus 20 dissents and 4 concurrences. Most cited: People v. Kern (162 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. 46 of these were attributed to Kavanagh 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
1967	People v. Kern	149 N.W.2d 216	162
1969	Allen v. Michigan Bell Telephone Co.†	171 N.W.2d 689	128
1967	People v. Askar	153 N.W.2d 888	53
1969	Mullins v. Wayne County†	168 N.W.2d 246	52
1968	People v. Stevens	157 N.W.2d 495	44
1968	Ray v. Transamerica Insurance	158 N.W.2d 786	39
1968	Shelby Mutual Insurance v. United States Fire Insurance	162 N.W.2d 676	37
1967	People v. Paul F. Baker	152 N.W.2d 43	34
1967	People v. Dye	148 N.W.2d 501	34
1966	People v. Eagger	145 N.W.2d 221	34
1965	People v. Schram	136 N.W.2d 44	34
1966	Williams v. Benson· Dissent†	141 N.W.2d 650	30
1968	People v. Camel	160 N.W.2d 790	29
1968	People v. Ivy	161 N.W.2d 403	27
1968	People v. Davison	163 N.W.2d 10	25

Showing the 15 most-cited of 171 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 Michigan Court of Appeals reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Thomas Giles Kavanagh on?: Thomas Giles Kavanagh was a Judge of the Michigan Court of Appeals.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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