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 1982 / Served to 1991

William Howard Billings

Justice, Supreme Court of Missouri

William Howard Billings was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Missouri, who joined the court in 1982. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1921 · age 105
Tenure: 1982–1991 · 9 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1982	Supreme Court of Missouri	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Billings authored 140 published opinions for the court (1968–1990), plus 19 dissents and 17 concurrences. Most cited: Sanders v. State (631 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. 69 of these were attributed to Billings 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
1987	Sanders v. State	738 S.W.2d 856	631
1989	Day v. State	770 S.W.2d 692	537
1989	State v. Dulany	781 S.W.2d 52	326
1983	Gustafson v. Benda· Concurrence†	661 S.W.2d 11	268
1985	Hoover's Dairy, Inc. v. Mid-America Dairymen, Inc./Special Products, Inc.· Concurrence†	700 S.W.2d 426	246
1990	State v. McMillin· Concurrence†	783 S.W.2d 82	215
1987	State v. Mallett	732 S.W.2d 527	195
1988	State v. Griffin	756 S.W.2d 475	187
1988	State v. Clemmons	753 S.W.2d 901	177
1983	State v. McDonald	661 S.W.2d 497	175
1988	State v. Murray	744 S.W.2d 762	158
1988	Johnson v. McDonnell Douglas Corp.	745 S.W.2d 661	157
1984	State v. Guinan	665 S.W.2d 325	157
1985	Frank v. Environmental Sanitation Management, Inc.	687 S.W.2d 876	151
1986	Nesselrode v. Executive Beechcraft, Inc.	707 S.W.2d 371	145

Showing the 15 most-cited of 176 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 William Howard Billings on?: William Howard Billings 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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9 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).