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

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

Missouri Court of Appeals / Joined 1884 / Served to 1888

James Ellison

Judge, Missouri Court of Appeals

James Ellison was a Judge of the Missouri Court of Appeals, who joined the court in 1884. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1850 · age 176
Tenure: 1884–1888 · 4 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1884	Missouri Court of Appeals	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Ellison authored 274 published opinions for the court (1884–1920), plus 3 dissents. Most cited: Munden v. Harris (70 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. 244 of these were attributed to Ellison 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
1911	Munden v. Harris	153 Mo. App. 652	70
1885	Cahn v. Reid†	18 Mo. App. 115	54
1911	Fairbanks Canning Co. v. London Guaranty & Accident Co.	133 S.W. 664	47
1888	State ex rel. Weber v. Tucker†	32 Mo. App. 620	30
1888	Hughes v. Menefee†	29 Mo. App. 192	29
1888	Woods v. Land†	30 Mo. App. 176	22
1887	Mason v. Missouri Pacific Railway Co.†	25 Mo. App. 473	21
1920	Malin v. Netherlands Insurance	219 S.W. 143	20
1885	Brown v. Wabash, St. Louis & Pacific R'y. Co.†	18 Mo. App. 568	20
1885	DeSteiger v. Hollington†	17 Mo. App. 382	20
1887	Barnard v. National Fire Insurance†	27 Mo. App. 26	19
1886	Ambrose Manufacturing Co. v. Gapen†	22 Mo. App. 397	19
1885	House v. Montgomery†	19 Mo. App. 170	18
1885	Potts v. Wabash, St. Louis & Pacific Ry. Co.†	17 Mo. App. 394	17
1887	Hamilton v. Clark†	25 Mo. App. 428	16

Showing the 15 most-cited of 281 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 Missouri Court of Appeals reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was James Ellison on?: James Ellison was a Judge of the Missouri Court of Appeals.

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