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

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

Supreme Court of Oklahoma / Joined 1958 / Served to 1978

William A. Berry

Justice, Supreme Court of Oklahoma

William A. Berry was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Oklahoma, who joined the court in 1958. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1915 · age 111
Tenure: 1958–1978 · 20 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1958	Supreme Court of Oklahoma	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Berry authored 519 published opinions for the court (1959–1978), plus 37 dissents and 16 concurrences. Most cited: Runyon v. Reid (151 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. 183 of these were attributed to Berry 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
1973	Runyon v. Reid	510 P.2d 943	151
1964	Poafpybitty v. Skelly Oil Company	394 P.2d 515	114
1974	Northrip v. Montgomery Ward & Co.· Concurrence†	529 P.2d 489	91
1965	Marathon Battery Company v. Kilpatrick	418 P.2d 900	89
1964	City of Duncan v. Bingham	394 P.2d 456	81
1962	Brown v. State Election Board of the Oklahoma· Dissent†	369 P.2d 140	77
1975	Johnson v. Ward	541 P.2d 182	72
1966	Sautbine v. Keller	423 P.2d 447	63
1963	Coe v. Esau	377 P.2d 815	62
1975	Shea v. Shea	537 P.2d 417	57
1963	Letteer v. Conservancy District No. 30	385 P.2d 796	56
1975	Cunningham v. Charles Pfizer & Co., Inc.	532 P.2d 1377	55
1964	H. J. Jeffries Truck Line v. Grisham· Dissent†	397 P.2d 637	55
1965	Sublett v. City of Tulsa	405 P.2d 185	54
1971	De Mik v. Cargill	485 P.2d 229	51

Showing the 15 most-cited of 573 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 Oklahoma reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was William A. Berry on?: William A. Berry was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Oklahoma.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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