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 1993 / Active

Joseph M. Ellis

Judge, Missouri Court of Appeals

Joseph M. Ellis is a Judge of the Missouri Court of Appeals, serving since 1993. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 1993 · 33 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1993	Missouri Court of Appeals	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Ellis authored 627 published opinions for the court (1993–2016), plus 12 dissents and 12 concurrences. Most cited: Davis v. Research Medical Center (171 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. 546 of these were attributed to Ellis 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
1995	Davis v. Research Medical Center†	903 S.W.2d 557	171
2005	Hoover v. Community Blood Center†	153 S.W.3d 9	79
1997	Crews v. Crews	949 S.W.2d 659	74
2005	Whitney v. Alltel Communications, Inc.†	173 S.W.3d 300	69
1998	Wallace v. Van Pelt†	969 S.W.2d 380	69
2000	Taylor v. Taylor†	25 S.W.3d 634	49
2009	White v. White†	293 S.W.3d 1	46
1997	McCreary v. McCreary	954 S.W.2d 433	45
2005	Pope v. Pope†	179 S.W.3d 442	43
2013	Lucero v. Curators of University of Missouri†	400 S.W.3d 1	41
1995	Barry Service Agency Co. v. Manning†	891 S.W.2d 882	40
2001	Henderson v. Fields†	68 S.W.3d 455	37
2008	Anderson Ex Rel. Anderson v. Ken Kauffman & Sons Excavating, L.L.C.· Concurrence†	248 S.W.3d 101	34
2007	Kelly v. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co.†	218 S.W.3d 517	34
1996	Wheeler v. Board of Police Commissioners of Kansas City†	918 S.W.2d 800	34

Showing the 15 most-cited of 651 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 Joseph M. Ellis on?: Joseph M. Ellis 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

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33 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).