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 2003 / Active

Jeffrey W. Bates

Judge, Missouri Court of Appeals

Jeffrey W. Bates is a Judge of the Missouri Court of Appeals, serving since 2003. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2003 · 22 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2003	Missouri Court of Appeals	–	–

Education

University of Missouri-Columbia

Judicial Record

In our data, Bates authored 547 published opinions for the court (2004–2025), plus 4 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Campbell (66 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. 131 of these were attributed to Bates 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
2004	State v. Campbell	122 S.W.3d 736	66
2007	Barekman v. City of Republic	232 S.W.3d 675	57
2006	State v. Lloyd	205 S.W.3d 893	41
2004	Birdsong v. Waste Management	147 S.W.3d 132	37
2005	State v. Newberry	157 S.W.3d 387	36
2008	State v. Lopez-McCurdy	266 S.W.3d 874	31
2004	State v. Stanley	124 S.W.3d 70	30
2005	Surrey Condominium Ass'n, Inc. v. Webb	163 S.W.3d 531	27
2004	Lee v. Hiler	141 S.W.3d 517	27
2010	Grider v. Tingle	325 S.W.3d 437	26
2008	W.H. v. S.B.†	245 S.W.3d 316	26
2007	Glover v. Michaud	222 S.W.3d 347	26
2004	Christian Health Care of Springfield West Park, Inc. v. Little	145 S.W.3d 44	26
2004	Bryan v. State	134 S.W.3d 795	26
2009	Finner v. Americold Logistics, LLC	298 S.W.3d 580	25

Showing the 15 most-cited of 551 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 is Jeffrey W. Bates on?: Jeffrey W. Bates is 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

See something wrong? Report an error. Fixes are logged in the corrections log.

22 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).