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Per-judge retention calls inside

The ballot

Maryland appellate judges are appointed by the governor, confirmed by the Senate, and then face the voters in a nonpartisan yes-or-no retention election for a 10-year term. A majority of YES votes retains the judge. The election is November 3, 2026. One Appellate Court of Maryland judge is up this year. Maryland has no judicial performance evaluation program — no commission grades and no published bar retention poll — so the evidence is the documented public record: appointment and service, published writing, teaching, and news coverage. Note for voters: at-large Appellate Court judges stand for retention statewide.

Judge Daniel A. Friedman (at-large)

Appointed by: Governor Martin O'Malley, August 26, 2014, to the seat vacated by Judge Albert Matricciani — on the court then called the Court of Special Appeals, renamed the Appellate Court of Maryland by the 2022 constitutional amendment. On the bench since: 2014 — 12 years of appellate service, and this is a re-retention: Maryland voters retained him in 2016 for the 10-year term that now ends December 31, 2026.

Credits — a scholar's file, which for an appellate judge is the working record. Before the bench: counsel to the Maryland General Assembly in the Attorney General's office (2008–14), where he advised the Governor's Redistricting Advisory Committee and the legislature after the 2010 census and helped defend Maryland's enacted state legislative redistricting plan (In re 2012 Legislative Districting) and congressional plan (Fletcher v. Lamone, affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court); Baltimore City chief of litigation (2000–02); special counsel at Saul Ewing; clerkships on both Maryland appellate and Baltimore circuit courts. He has taught as an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland School of Law since 1998. On the bench he has continued to publish on the craft itself: a Maryland Law Review article on retroactive civil laws under Article 17 of the Maryland Declaration of Rights (2024, with Barnett Harris), and widely carried essays arguing that judges should reject any single mandatory method of constitutional interpretation and explaining the Maryland Constitution's history — public, signed, checkable legal scholarship that lets voters read exactly how he thinks a judge should judge.

Dirt column: No misconduct, no discipline, no ethics finding, and no organized retention campaign against Judge Friedman appears in this research. The only partisan-adjacent fact in the file is biographical and cuts both ways: as a government lawyer he defended Democratic-drawn redistricting maps — that was his client's case as counsel to the General Assembly, the ordinary work of that office, and it is printed here because it is the closest thing to a controversy the record holds. Advocacy for a client before taking the bench is not judging after it.

Evaluation: None exists in Maryland. There is no evaluation failure in this file because there is no evaluation to fail; the functional evaluation is the one Maryland voters themselves delivered in 2016, when they retained him for the term now ending.

OUR CALL

Daniel A. Friedman — RETAIN.

Our standard is the same in every state in this coverage: Retain for a serviceable documented record; Do Not Retain requires proven cause — documented misconduct, proven activist judging, or an evaluation failure. Twelve years of appellate service, a retention already granted by Maryland voters in 2016, and a public scholarly record that invites exactly the scrutiny retention exists to apply — that is the credits column, and it is thick. The dirt column, after a deep pass through his appointment record, service, published writing, and news coverage, holds no proven entry at all. Absence of dirt is not by itself a reason to retain anyone; here it accompanies a documented, checkable, serviceable record, and that combination is what Retain means on this page.

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Sources

Election result — November 4, 2026

Result pending. No verified call (Associated Press or official) as of November 4, 2026. This page will be updated when the race is called or certified. The original article above is unchanged.

AI-assisted article — but the sources are human, and the facts are very real.

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