- Six candidates are running for two open seats on the Michigan Supreme Court
- The state’s highest court is currently led by a 6-1 liberal majority
- The court has decided several key provisions in recent years, including one that removed 20,000 people from the sex offender registry
Early results show Michigan Supreme Court Justices Megan Cavanagh and Noah Hood with a lead on Republican nominees Casandra Morse-Bills and Michael D. Warren Jr.
The polls have closed.
US Taxpayers Party candidates Thomas Howe and Jody White are also running but are not licensed to practice law in Michigan and are therefore ineligible to serve on the court.
Although Supreme Court elections in Michigan are nonpartisan, candidates’ nominations are a political process, with delegates at state party conventions determining who advances to the November ballot.
The state GOP had sought to cut into the liberal majority, nominating two experienced circuit court judges and pitching them as an ideological counterbalance.
But they faced heavy spending by the incumbent candidates and their supporters, who continued investing in a multiyear effort to first flip and then maintain the court’s ideological bent.
RELATED:
- Who’s running for Michigan Supreme Court? 6 candidates compete for 2 seats
- Michigan Supreme Court moves to curb courthouse immigration arrests
- Citizenship voting proposal kept off ballot by US, Michigan Supreme Courts
Democrat-nominated incumbents have spent more than $840,000 on television ads to try to secure reelection, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Separately, the group Justice for All Michigan spent an estimated $2.19 million and the ACLU Voter Education Fund spent about $400,000 in Michigan’s Supreme Court elections.
The Michigan Supreme Court often has the final say on issues of critical importance, including whether laws enacted by the state Legislature are constitutional or whether ballot measures should go before voters.
The court has in recent months made several precedent-setting decisions on criminal law, including limits on the constitutionality of mandatory life without parole sentences and a ruling declaring the state’s sex offender registry law unconstitutional if applied retroactively.
The latter decision has already resulted in the removal of more than 20,000 people from the list.
The court also adopted a rule this year aiming to limit the ability of law enforcement officers to make civil arrests — including immigration arrests of suspected noncitizens — in state and local courtrooms.
Learn more about the candidates below:
Megan Cavanagh
First elected to the court in 2018, Cavanagh graduated from Wayne State University Law School and worked as an appellate attorney. Before shifting to the legal field, she worked as a consultant in environmental engineering.
She was unanimously selected as the Michigan Supreme Court’s chief justice in March 2025. Her father served on the court from 1983 to 2015 and was chief justice from 1991 to 1995.
Cavanagh authored the landmark Bauserman v. Unemployment Insurance Agency decision in 2022, which held that Michigan residents can sue the state for damages if their constitutional rights are violated.
Other notable opinions by Cavanagh include Pueblo v. Haas, which held that unmarried LGBTQ partners denied the right to marry under Michigan’s former same-sex marriage ban have legal standing to seek child custody and parenting time, and People v. Jennings, which expanded Michigan’s double jeopardy protections beyond a narrower federal standard.
During a recent League of Women Voters forum, Cavanagh said that in addition to deciding cases, her focus on the court has been to expand access to justice, improve child welfare outcomes, strengthen legal representation for families and build meaningful collaboration with the state’s tribal courts.
Cavanagh said she views access to justice as the biggest problem currently facing the court, pointing to efforts justices have taken in recent years to revamp court forms and make the state’s legal system easier to navigate and understand.
She argued that the court should be “very cautious” about deciding political questions, noting that the court has increasingly been called upon to decide politically fraught issues “that should be resolved by other branches” as society becomes increasingly polarized.
Noah Hood
Hood, of Detroit, was appointed to the bench in April 2025 by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat,to fill the remainder of former Chief Justice Elizabeth Clement’s term.
A graduate of Harvard Law School and Yale, Hood previously served on the Third Circuit Court and Michigan Court of Appeals. His mother is former federal Judge Denise Page Hood and his father, theRev. Nicholas Hood III, previously served on the Detroit City Council.
Hood recently authored a 4-3 majority opinion in Attorney General v. Eli Lilly, reversing two past court decisions that limited enforcement of the state’s Consumer Protection Act in cases of deceptive business practices and price gouging.
The ruling allowed Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel to proceed with an investigation of Eli Lilly and Co.’s insulin pricing practices and has broader implications for future use of the consumer protection law.
Pointing to his experience serving as a trial and appellate judge as well as his time on the Michigan Supreme Court, Hood said during the League of Women Voters forum that he is “uniquely well-suited” to see the choke points in the legal system and serve on the state’s highest court.
Hood described his ideology as fact-based and methodical, looking for trends and themes that emerge from past cases.
Asked whether politics has an impact on the court’s decisions, he said that it does, arguing that justices under the state’s past conservative court majorities “did do a lot of legislating from the bench” and that the court’s current approach is a “return to the normal way a court should operate.”
He said he views the imbalance of resources between courts around the state as the biggest problem currently facing courts and something that “permeates every level of our judiciary.”
Casandra Morse-Bills
Morse-Bills is a circuit court judge in northern Michigan serving Alcona, Arenac, Iosco, and Oscoda counties. She also serves on the Michigan Judicial Council.
A graduate of Cooley Law School, Morse-Bills said during a recent League of Women Voters forum that she’s running for the Michigan Supreme Court because “I have firsthand experienced and seen the radical changes that have occurred in our judicial system” in recent years.
She argued that recent Supreme Court opinions have been “unfair, unjust and are not equal under the law.”
As a judge, Morse-Bills has presided over many cases. Last year, in one high-profile case, she sentenced a man to 25 to 60 years for first-degree criminal sexual assault.
Morse-Bills previously worked as Oscoda County prosecutor and in 2020 was sued over her failed prosecution of two residents who had tried to remove a neighbor’s shed they believed to be on their property. A federal judge dismissed the case in 2022, ruling Morse-Bills had governmental immunity.
Morse-Bills described herself as a rule-of-law judge and said she would “absolutely avoid” party politics or influence of political agendas on decisionmaking in the courtroom. She said one of her biggest priorities if elected would be to restore trust in the judicial system.
Michael D. Warren, Jr.
Warren has served on the Oakland County Circuit Court for more than 23 years, overseeing more than 400 jury trials during that time.
Since his 2002 appointment by then-Gov. John Engler, a Republican, Warren has overseen criminal, family, civil and business court cases and won reelection five times. He was also an early adopter of e-filing and paperless courtroom systems, piloting a court e-filing project as early as 2004.
A graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, Warren has taught legal courses and is also an author and the founder of Patriot Week, an effort to encourage civic engagement during the week between 9/11 and Sept. 17, the anniversary of the Constitution’s signing. Prior to his work as a judge, Warren served on the state Board of Education.
If elected, Warren said he would bring a “depth of experience that is really needed in our Supreme Court,” noting that the current ideological split of the court is “very unbalanced.”
In addition to his nomination by the Republican Party, Warren said he’s also been endorsed by the Libertarian Party.
As a judge, he said the ideal role is “not to put the thumbs on the scale of justice, but to apply the law fairly and impartially based on what the law says” and he said he’s concerned by any implication that politics should play a role in the court’s proceedings.
Warren said his two primary concerns with the current court system are overworked, overextended judges in many of the state’s trial courts resulting in delays of justice and the six-to-one ideological split on the bench.
