How do judges of the Missouri Court of Appeals reach the bench?

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

Missouri Court of Appeals / Joined 2008 / Active

Zel Fischer

Judge, Missouri Court of Appeals

Zel Fischer is a Judge of the Missouri Court of Appeals, serving since 2008. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2008 · 17 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2008	Missouri Court of Appeals	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Fischer authored 4 published opinions for the court (2009–2011). Most cited: State v. Blair (8 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. 2 of these were attributed to Fischer 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
2009	State v. Blair	298 S.W.3d 38	8
2011	State v. Hannah†	337 S.W.3d 114	6
2011	Nokes v. HMS Host USA, LLC†	353 S.W.3d 6	5
2009	Cantrell v. Baldwin Transportation, Inc.	296 S.W.3d 17	2

Showing the 4 most-cited of 4 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 Missouri Court of Appeals reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court is Zel Fischer on?: Zel Fischer is a Judge of the Missouri Court of Appeals.

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 Missouri Court of Appeals. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).