Missouri Lawyers Awards 2025: Michael Wolff

Missouri Supreme Court, retired
St. Louis

Judge Michael Wolff has been advocating for important changes and his voice carries a lot of weight at the Missouri Supreme Court.

After all, he used to be the chief justice of the court.

“I’ve been failing at retirements for years,” jokes the 79-year-old speaking about his continued work in the judicial arena.

Wolff was among a group of attorneys who led legal challenges to Missouri’s recent legislation stiffening redaction rules for court documents. He said the much broader swath of redaction requirements could interfere with freedom of the press.

“We were the only state in the country that had this very severe regimen of redacting names,” said Wolff who served on the state’s highest court from 1998 through 2011 when he retired to return to Saint Louis University School of Law, where he’d later be named dean.

Wolff noted that redaction, while it might serve a purpose in situations involving minors or vulnerable parties, should not be applied so broadly as to cover all witnesses or experts.

“Those are things that have to be in the public domain so that the public can understand what happened, who did what and why,” he said.

Wolff’s recent work on redaction issues isn’t his only attempt at reform. He’s also set his sights on the “points relied on” rule which he feels makes an appellate attorney jump through hoops that could get an otherwise worthy case dismissed on a technicality.

“In some courts of appeal, you’ll find that maybe 15, 20 or 25 percent of the cases of the appeals are being dismissed because they didn’t follow the points relied on rule accurately,” he said, indicating that he wrote to the state Supreme Court on the matter. “Most appeals that I’ve seen are serious cases. Having them dismissed for non-serious reasons strikes me as a problem of denying access to justice to those lawyer’s clients.”

He believes that both the “points relied on” rule and the redaction statute have one thing in common.

“They’ve made appellate practice more difficult and more challenging for people who are just trying to get a resolution of perhaps legitimate claims,” he said.