How do judges of the Supreme Court of Oklahoma reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.

Supreme Court of Oklahoma / Joined 1933 / Served to 1965

Earl Welch

Justice, Supreme Court of Oklahoma

Earl Welch was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Oklahoma, who joined the court in 1933. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1892–1969
Tenure: 1933–1965 · 32 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1933	Supreme Court of Oklahoma	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Welch authored 970 published opinions for the court (1931–1964), plus 115 dissents and 34 concurrences. Most cited: Seitz v. Jones (95 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. 265 of these were attributed to Welch 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
1961	Seitz v. Jones	370 P.2d 300	95
1950	Application of Oklahoma Turnpike Authority	221 P.2d 795	86
1937	Boswell v. State· Dissent	74 P.2d 940	81
1951	DENCO BUS LINES, INC. v. Hargis	229 P.2d 560	67
1945	Oklahoma County v. Queen City Lodge No. 197, I. O. O. F.	156 P.2d 340	63
1941	Gurney v. Ferguson	122 P.2d 1002	57
1954	Boydston v. State	277 P.2d 138	51
1951	National Bank of Tulsa Bldg. v. Goldsmith	226 P.2d 916	47
1938	Oklahoma Natural Gas Co. v. Courtney	79 P.2d 235	47
1937	Jack v. State· Dissent	82 P.2d 1033	47
1954	Young v. West Edmond Hunton Lime Unit	275 P.2d 304	46
1938	Morrison v. Roberts	82 P.2d 1023	46
1934	Miller v. Price· Concurrence	33 P.2d 624	46
1937	Enders v. Longmire	67 P.2d 12	45
1933	State Ex Rel. Roth v. Waterfield· Separate	29 P.2d 24	44

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,129 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 Supreme Court of Oklahoma reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Earl Welch on?: Earl Welch was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Oklahoma.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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