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 1970 / Served to 1984

Laurence R. Smith

Judge, Missouri Court of Appeals

Laurence R. Smith was a Judge of the Missouri Court of Appeals, who joined the court in 1970. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1914–2012
Tenure: 1970–1984 · 14 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1970	Missouri Court of Appeals	–	–

Education

Moorpark College
University of Kansas

Judicial Record

In our data, Smith authored 452 published opinions for the court (1970–1984), plus 3 dissents and 9 concurrences. Most cited: Racer v. Utterman (80 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. 348 of these were attributed to Smith 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
1981	Racer v. Utterman	629 S.W.2d 387	80
1978	State v. Pride	567 S.W.2d 426	52
1980	State v. Black	611 S.W.2d 236	46
1973	State v. Brooks	513 S.W.2d 168	41
1983	Meadows v. Friedman Railroad Salvage Warehouse	655 S.W.2d 718	38
1980	Laclede Investment Corp. v. Kaiser	596 S.W.2d 36	38
1976	State v. Williams	542 S.W.2d 3	38
1973	Sumpter v. JE Sieben Construction Company	492 S.W.2d 150	37
1983	Braxton v. United States Fire Insurance Co.· Dissent†	651 S.W.2d 616	35
1982	Allstate Ins. Co. v. Sullivan	643 S.W.2d 21	34
1982	Marriage of Tzinberg v. Tzinberg	631 S.W.2d 681	31
1979	Raines v. Raines	583 S.W.2d 564	31
1977	Lititz Mutual Insurance Co. v. Branch	561 S.W.2d 371	29
1972	Griggs v. Riley	489 S.W.2d 469	29
1980	State v. Crews	607 S.W.2d 729	28

Showing the 15 most-cited of 464 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 Laurence R. Smith on?: Laurence R. Smith 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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14 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).