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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Court of Appeals of Minnesota / Joined 1995 / Served to 1999

Bruce D. Willis

Judge, Court of Appeals of Minnesota

Bruce D. Willis was a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Minnesota, who joined the court in 1995. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1995–1999 · 4 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1995	Court of Appeals of Minnesota	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Willis authored 203 published opinions for the court (1995–2008), plus 1 concurrence. Most cited: State v. Butcher (45 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. 11 of these were attributed to Willis 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
1997	State v. Butcher	563 N.W.2d 776	45
2002	State v. Mendoza	638 N.W.2d 480	43
1997	Geibe v. Geibe	571 N.W.2d 774	38
1998	State v. Ward	580 N.W.2d 67	36
2008	State v. Holiday	749 N.W.2d 833	33
2006	Nichols v. Reliant Engineering & Manufacturing, Inc.	720 N.W.2d 590	30
1998	Sykes v. State	578 N.W.2d 807	27
1999	Bode v. Minnesota Department of Natural Resources	594 N.W.2d 257	25
1996	Rothmeier v. Investment Advisers, Inc.	556 N.W.2d 590	25
1996	Midwest Sports Marketing, Inc. v. Hillerich & Bradsby of Canada, Ltd.†	552 N.W.2d 254	25
2004	State v. Ruoho	685 N.W.2d 451	22
1998	Carter v. Olmsted County Housing	574 N.W.2d 725	22
1998	State v. Collins	580 N.W.2d 36	21
1996	Marriage of Abu-Dalbouh v. Abu-Dalbouh	547 N.W.2d 700	21
2004	State v. Johnson	679 N.W.2d 378	20

Showing the 15 most-cited of 204 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 Court of Appeals of Minnesota reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Bruce D. Willis on?: Bruce D. Willis was a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Minnesota.

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