William Van Ness Bay (November 23, 1818 – February 10, 1894) was an American attorney and judge from Missouri.
[1][2] Among the prospective lawyers who studied under John Bay were Ambrose Spencer, who later practiced law in partnership with him, and William W. Van Ness.
[1] William Bay was educated in Columbia County, New York and moved to Missouri in 1835.
[1] In his only House speech, Bay called for the admission of California to the Union as a free state as part of the Compromise of 1850, condemned the presidential administration of Millard Fillmore, a Whig, for carrying out unpopular parts of the compromise including the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and pleaded with northern abolitionists not to do anything on the slavery question that would be perceived as aggressive by southern slaveholders.
[1] Bay was appointed a judge of the Supreme Court of Missouri in 1862 when the incumbent Supreme Court judges were removed after refusing to swear loyalty oaths to the Union during the American Civil War.
He won election to the position in 1863[1] and served until June 1865, when he was removed by Governor Thomas Clement Fletcher, in keeping with a post-Civil War amendment to the state constitution which vacated all judgeships that had been filled during the war.