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 1994 / Served to 2001

Laura D. Stith

Judge, Missouri Court of Appeals

Laura D. Stith was a Judge of the Missouri Court of Appeals, who joined the court in 1994. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1994–2001 · 7 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1994	Missouri Court of Appeals	–	–

Education

Tufts University
Georgetown University

Judicial Record

In our data, Stith authored 294 published opinions for the court (1995–2008), plus 5 dissents and 1 concurrence. Most cited: Bradley Ex Rel. Pope v. Ray (55 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. 269 of these were attributed to Stith 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	Bradley Ex Rel. Pope v. Ray†	904 S.W.2d 302	55
1997	State v. Woodworth†	941 S.W.2d 679	52
1997	Sokol v. Labor & Industrial Relations Commission of Missouri†	946 S.W.2d 20	49
2000	Tuttle v. Muenks†	21 S.W.3d 6	44
1998	Pollard v. Whitener· Dissent†	965 S.W.2d 281	41
2000	Taylor v. Taylor†	12 S.W.3d 340	38
1997	Division of Family Services v. V.W.†	945 S.W.2d 85	37
1999	State v. Woolfolk†	3 S.W.3d 823	35
1999	State v. Wright†	998 S.W.2d 78	35
1999	State v. Pfleiderer†	8 S.W.3d 249	31
1995	State v. Idlebird†	896 S.W.2d 656	31
2000	In the Interest of C.L.B. v. Juvenile Officer†	22 S.W.3d 233	30
1999	Walker v. Hanke†	992 S.W.2d 925	30
1998	Rinehart v. Anderson†	985 S.W.2d 363	29
1995	State v. Dees†	916 S.W.2d 287	29

Showing the 15 most-cited of 300 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 Laura D. Stith on?: Laura D. Stith 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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7 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).