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 1996 / Served to 2008

Paul Spinden

Judge, Missouri Court of Appeals

Paul Spinden was a Judge of the Missouri Court of Appeals, who joined the court in 1996. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1996–2008 · 12 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1996	Missouri Court of Appeals	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Spinden authored 487 published opinions for the court (1993–2009), plus 3 dissents and 9 concurrences. Most cited: Brown v. Ameristar Casino Kansas City, Inc. (65 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. 259 of these were attributed to Spinden 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
2007	Brown v. Ameristar Casino Kansas City, Inc.†	211 S.W.3d 145	65
2002	Rosehill Gardens, Inc. v. Luttrell	67 S.W.3d 641	51
2002	Missouri Consolidated Health Care Plan v. Community Health Plan	81 S.W.3d 34	47
2008	Dibben v. Shelter Insurance Co.	261 S.W.3d 553	43
2002	State v. Rose· Concurrence†	86 S.W.3d 90	43
2008	Kansas City Urology, P.A. v. United Healthcare Services	261 S.W.3d 7	35
2004	State v. Buchli	152 S.W.3d 289	35
2002	State v. Taber	73 S.W.3d 699	35
1996	Witt v. Witt	930 S.W.2d 500	32
2002	Richardson v. QuikTrip Corp.· Concurrence†	81 S.W.3d 54	31
1993	State v. Foster	854 S.W.2d 1	31
1999	State v. Dunn	7 S.W.3d 427	30
2003	In the Interest of C.N.G.†	109 S.W.3d 702	29
2003	State v. Belton	108 S.W.3d 171	29
1999	Horner v. Spalitto	1 S.W.3d 519	27

Showing the 15 most-cited of 499 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 Paul Spinden on?: Paul Spinden 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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12 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).