United States District Court for the Western District of Missouri

United States District Court for the Western District of Missouri
(W.D. Mo.)
Appeals to:	Eighth Circuit
Established:	March 16, 1822
Judges assigned:	6
Chief Judge:	David Gregory Kays
http://www.mow.uscourts.gov/

The United States District Court for the Western District of Missouri (in case citations, W.D. Mo.) is the federal judicial district encompassing 66 counties in the western half of the State of Missouri. The Court is based in the Charles Evans Whittaker Courthouse in Kansas City.

As of January 2014, Judge David Gregory Kays is the Chief Judge, and Tammy Dickinson is the current U.S. Attorney, having been confirmed in the Senate by voice vote on New Years Day, 2013. She was nominated to replace now Judge Mary Elizabeth Phillips, who resigned as U.S. Attorney and was subsequently nominated and confirmed as one of the Court's judges.

Missouri was admitted as a state on August 10, 1821, and the United States Congress established the United States District Court for the District of Missouri on March 16, 1822. The District was assigned to the Eighth Circuit on March 3, 1837. Congress subdivided it into Eastern and Western Districts on March 3, 1857. and has since made only small adjustments to the boundaries of that subdivision. The division was prompted by a substantial increase in the number of admiralty cases arising from traffic on the Mississippi River, which had followed an act of Congress passed in 1845 and upheld by the United States Supreme Court in 1851, extending federal admiralty jurisdiction to inland waterways. These disputes involved "contracts of affreightment, collisions, mariners' wages, and other causes of admiralty jurisdiction", and litigants of matters arising in St. Louis found it inconvenient to travel to Jefferson City for their cases to be tried.

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