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 1979 / Served to 1989

Warren Dee Welliver

Justice, Supreme Court of Missouri

Warren Dee Welliver was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Missouri, who joined the court in 1979. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1920–2007
Tenure: 1979–1989 · 10 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1979	Supreme Court of Missouri	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Welliver authored 157 published opinions for the court (1979–1989), plus 129 dissents and 47 concurrences. Most cited: Gustafson v. Benda (268 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. 215 of these were attributed to Welliver 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
1983	Gustafson v. Benda	661 S.W.2d 11	268
1985	Hoover's Dairy, Inc. v. Mid-America Dairymen, Inc./Special Products, Inc.	700 S.W.2d 426	246
1983	Bass v. Nooney Co.· Dissent†	646 S.W.2d 765	181
1984	Hoffmann v. Hoffmann· Concurrence†	676 S.W.2d 817	177
1985	Kanagawa v. State by and Through Freeman	685 S.W.2d 831	173
1980	Sours v. State	593 S.W.2d 208	167
1982	State v. Shaw	636 S.W.2d 667	165
1980	Sours v. State	603 S.W.2d 592	161
1982	State v. Bolder	635 S.W.2d 673	160
1984	Dardick v. Dardick	670 S.W.2d 865	158
1985	Frank v. Environmental Sanitation Management, Inc.· Dissent†	687 S.W.2d 876	151
1983	State v. Williams· Dissent†	652 S.W.2d 102	150
1984	Fowler v. Park Corp.· Dissent†	673 S.W.2d 749	146
1986	Nesselrode v. Executive Beechcraft, Inc.· Dissent†	707 S.W.2d 371	145
1983	Wolfgeher v. Wagner Cartage Service, Inc.· Dissent†	646 S.W.2d 781	136

Showing the 15 most-cited of 334 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 was Warren Dee Welliver on?: Warren Dee Welliver was 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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10 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).