How do judges of the Kansas Supreme Court reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.

Kansas Supreme Court / Joined 1977 / Served to 1995

Richard W. Holmes

Justice, Kansas Supreme Court

Richard W. Holmes was a Justice of the Kansas Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1977. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1923–1999
Tenure: 1977–1995 · 17 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1977	Kansas Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Kansas State University
Washburn University

Judicial Record

In our data, Holmes authored 365 published opinions for the court (1977–1995), plus 16 dissents and 10 concurrences. Most cited: Chamberlain v. State (282 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. 75 of these were attributed to Holmes 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
1985	Chamberlain v. State	694 P.2d 468	282
1986	State v. Van Cleave	716 P.2d 580	230
1985	Ling v. Jan's Liquors· Concurrence†	703 P.2d 731	224
1992	Todd v. Kelly	837 P.2d 381	218
1992	Martindale v. Tenny	829 P.2d 561	179
1986	Turner v. Halliburton Co.	722 P.2d 1106	168
1982	In Re the Adoption of Baby Boy L.	643 P.2d 168	160
1989	State v. Nunn	768 P.2d 268	156
1991	Bair v. Peck	811 P.2d 1176	152
1983	State v. Deskins	673 P.2d 1174	149
1982	Denison State Bank v. Madeira	640 P.2d 1235	138
1986	Moore v. State Bank of Burden	729 P.2d 1205	104
1988	State v. Fike	757 P.2d 724	100
1989	Leiker Ex Rel. Leiker v. Gafford	778 P.2d 823	98
1994	Delaney v. Cade	873 P.2d 175	88

Showing the 15 most-cited of 391 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 Kansas Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Richard W. Holmes on?: Richard W. Holmes was a Justice of the Kansas Supreme Court.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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17 years on the Kansas Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).