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 1989 / Served to 2002

John C. Holstein

Justice, Supreme Court of Missouri

John C. Holstein was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Missouri, who joined the court in 1989. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1945 · age 81
Tenure: 1989–2002 · 13 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1989	Supreme Court of Missouri	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Holstein authored 168 published opinions for the court (1989–2002), plus 29 dissents and 20 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Chaney (291 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. 82 of these were attributed to Holstein 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
1998	State v. Chaney	967 S.W.2d 47	291
1992	State v. Blankenship	830 S.W.2d 1	229
1992	State v. Hunter	840 S.W.2d 850	202
1994	Committee for Educational Equality v. State	878 S.W.2d 446	197
1991	State v. Twenter	818 S.W.2d 628	189
1994	State v. Gray	887 S.W.2d 369	170
1992	State v. Mease	842 S.W.2d 98	169
1996	State v. Taylor· Dissent†	929 S.W.2d 209	168
1997	Wilkerson v. Prelutsky	943 S.W.2d 643	167
1993	State v. Ramsey	864 S.W.2d 320	164
1992	Krombach v. Mayflower Ins. Co., Ltd.	827 S.W.2d 208	164
1993	State v. Parkhurst	845 S.W.2d 31	159
1995	McHaffie Ex Rel. McHaffie v. Bunch	891 S.W.2d 822	154
1992	Anglim v. Missouri Pacific Railroad	832 S.W.2d 298	151
1999	State v. Withrow	8 S.W.3d 75	146

Showing the 15 most-cited of 217 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 John C. Holstein on?: John C. Holstein 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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13 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).