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 2001 / Active

Laura Denvir Stith

Justice, Supreme Court of Missouri

Laura Denvir Stith is a Justice of the Supreme Court of Missouri, serving since 2001. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1953 · age 73
Tenure: Since 2001 · 25 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2001	Supreme Court of Missouri	–	–

Education

Tufts University
Georgetown University

Judicial Record

In our data, Stith authored 218 published opinions for the court (2001–2021), plus 21 dissents and 23 concurrences. Most cited: Deck v. State (260 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. 110 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
2002	Deck v. State	68 S.W.3d 418	260
2005	Worthington v. State	166 S.W.3d 566	246
2003	State v. Edwards	116 S.W.3d 511	232
2007	Seeck v. Geico General Insurance Co.	212 S.W.3d 129	220
2011	Goerlitz v. City of Maryville· Concurrence†	333 S.W.3d 450	193
2001	State v. Whalen	49 S.W.3d 181	168
2007	Hess v. Chase Manhattan Bank, USA, N.A.	220 S.W.3d 758	163
2010	Burns v. Smith	303 S.W.3d 505	150
2014	Price v. State· Dissent†	422 S.W.3d 292	133
2014	State of Missouri v. Bruce Pierce· Concurrence†	433 S.W.3d 390	130
2009	Ritchie v. Allied Property & Casualty Insurance Co.	307 S.W.3d 132	130
2011	Moore v. Ford Motor Co.	332 S.W.3d 749	123
2001	State v. Mayes	63 S.W.3d 615	123
2010	State v. Bateman	318 S.W.3d 681	120
2003	State v. Whitfield	107 S.W.3d 253	120

Showing the 15 most-cited of 262 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 is Laura Denvir Stith on?: Laura Denvir Stith is 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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25 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).