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 1978 / Served to 1990

Walter P. Cynar

Judge, Michigan Court of Appeals

Walter P. Cynar was a Judge of the Michigan Court of Appeals, who joined the court in 1978. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1978–1990 · 12 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1978	Michigan Court of Appeals	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Cynar authored 396 published opinions for the court (1978–1990), plus 49 dissents and 40 concurrences. Most cited: People v. Robideau (233 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. 313 of these were attributed to Cynar 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
1980	People v. Robideau†	289 N.W.2d 846	233
1983	Davis v. Lhim· Dissent†	335 N.W.2d 481	80
1989	People v. Marji†	447 N.W.2d 835	56
1981	Morris v. Metriyakool†	309 N.W.2d 910	54
1988	St Paul Fire & Marine Insurance v. Quintana†	419 N.W.2d 60	51
1982	People v. American Medical Centers of Michigan, Ltd.	324 N.W.2d 782	51
1982	Vigilant Insurance v. Kambly· Concurrence†	319 N.W.2d 382	51
1981	Brown v. Siang· Concurrence†	309 N.W.2d 575	49
1980	People v. Pace· Concurrence†	302 N.W.2d 216	45
1982	Meyer v. Hubbell	324 N.W.2d 139	43
1979	O'Key v. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance†	89 Mich. App. 526	43
1979	Tiffany v. the Christman Co.†	287 N.W.2d 199	39
1988	People v. Reinhardt†	423 N.W.2d 275	37
1981	Sewell v. Bathey Manufacturing Co.†	303 N.W.2d 876	36
1979	People v. Roberson†	282 N.W.2d 280	36

Showing the 15 most-cited of 485 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 Walter P. Cynar on?: Walter P. Cynar 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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12 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).