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

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

Supreme Court of Missouri / Joined 1954 / Served to 1963

Henry J. Westhues

Justice, Supreme Court of Missouri

Henry J. Westhues was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Missouri, who joined the court in 1954. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1954–1963 · 9 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1954	Supreme Court of Missouri	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Westhues authored 584 published opinions for the court (1930–1968), plus 5 dissents and 6 concurrences. Most cited: Borgstede v. Waldbauer (100 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. 123 of these were attributed to Westhues 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
1935	Borgstede v. Waldbauer	88 S.W.2d 373	100
1943	Thatcher v. De Tar	173 S.W.2d 760	76
1932	State v. Sinovich	46 S.W.2d 877	68
1936	Doherty Ex Rel. Doherty v. St. Louis Butter Co.	98 S.W.2d 742	67
1956	Pizzo v. Pizzo· Concurrence†	295 S.W.2d 377	62
1956	Nastasio v. Cinnamon· Dissent†	295 S.W.2d 117	60
1931	Wheeler v. Missouri Pacific Railroad Co.	42 S.W.2d 579	59
1957	Crow v. Missouri Implement Tractor Company	307 S.W.2d 401	52
1933	State v. Richards	67 S.W.2d 58	52
1936	Nelson v. Evans	93 S.W.2d 691	49
1931	State v. Clough	38 S.W.2d 36	49
1955	Anderson v. Cinnamon· Dissent†	282 S.W.2d 445	44
1949	Cruce v. Gulf, Mobile Ohio Railroad Co.	216 S.W.2d 78	42
1938	Bates v. Brown Shoe Co.	116 S.W.2d 31	42
1939	Estate of Bernays v. Major· Concurrence	126 S.W.2d 209	41

Showing the 15 most-cited of 595 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 Missouri reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Henry J. Westhues on?: Henry J. Westhues was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Missouri.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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