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 1950 / Served to 1965

William J. Wertz

Justice, Kansas Supreme Court

William J. Wertz was a Justice of the Kansas Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1950. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1896–1987
Tenure: 1950–1965 · 15 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1950	Kansas Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Wertz authored 470 published opinions for the court (1950–1965), plus 18 dissents and 2 concurrences. Most cited: Noel Ex Rel. Noel v. Menninger Foundation (93 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. 74 of these were attributed to Wertz 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
1954	Noel Ex Rel. Noel v. Menninger Foundation	267 P.2d 934	93
1964	State v. Turner	392 P.2d 863	66
1953	Cain v. Steely	252 P.2d 909	65
1963	Jones v. Garrett	386 P.2d 194	64
1960	Blackmore v. Auer· Dissent†	357 P.2d 765	56
1963	Addington v. Board of County Commissioners	382 P.2d 315	50
1961	State v. Wilson	360 P.2d 1092	50
1956	Foster v. Humburg	299 P.2d 46	50
1956	State v. Merrifield	303 P.2d 155	46
1958	Felten Truck Line, Inc. v. State Board of Tax Appeals	327 P.2d 836	44
1955	State v. Leigh	289 P.2d 774	42
1951	In Re Estate of Wright	228 P.2d 911	42
1962	Koppel v. City of Fairway	371 P.2d 113	39
1955	Sundgren v. Topeka Transportation Co.	283 P.2d 444	38
1962	Hunter v. American Rentals, Inc.	371 P.2d 131	37

Showing the 15 most-cited of 490 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 William J. Wertz on?: William J. Wertz 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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15 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).