The Honorable Robert Francis Devoy was born to F.X. and Frances Devoy in 1926. After graduating from Brookfield High School in 1944 and subsequently earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in the demanding subject areas of chemistry and mathematics at the University of Missouri-Columbia, Robert Devoy gladly served his country during the Korean Conflict for two years as a supply sergeant.
Devoy has always seemed to embrace humility but seldom allowed it to stifle his ambition to serve in whatever capacity might be most beneficial for his community, state, or nation. While the usual progression of a career in law is from attorney to judge, and, for the best and brightest, a term or two as legislator, Devoy began serving as a member of the Missouri House of Representatives less than a year after graduating from M.U.’s School of Law in 1955. He was re-elected for a second term in the House, but not until he had taken time out to apply the law as Linn County Prosecutor from 1961 through 1964.
Although it is difficult for those who fear role conflict to imagine juggling opposing roles as if there were no antagonism between them at all, Devoy helped fashion law in the State Capitol at the same time he was applying it in the courts at home in Linn County; he was in legal practice out of a Brookfield office during the very years he was serving as a state legislator in Jefferson City. Devoy has been a distinguished judge for the Missouri 9th Circuit since 1983.
To the traditionalist, legislating first from the floor of a state legislature and afterward from the bench might seem heretical, but a comparison of the progression of Devoy's legal career to the evolution of American jurisprudence reveals a biography that in some sense recapitulates history.Prior to 1800, it was believed that the appropriate role of the American judge was to merely discover and apply pre-existing rules, not to help fashion social policy from the bench. Lawmaking was to be left to the legislator. Just as Devoy launched his career in the legislature where lawmaking is preeminent and was once thought to be its exclusive domain, he is closing his career from the bench, a position from which law has since found itself being reinterpreted and modified. American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes captured this transformation in his famous declaration, "the life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience."