How do judges of the Illinois Supreme Court reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Illinois Supreme Court / Joined 1885 / Served to 1906

Benjamin Drake Magruder

Justice, Illinois Supreme Court

Benjamin Drake Magruder was a Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court (7 judges, selected by partisan election), who joined the court in 1885. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1838–1910
Tenure: 1885–1906 · 21 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1885	Illinois Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Yale University

Judicial Record

In our data, Magruder authored 751 published opinions for the court (1885–1906), plus 59 dissents and 4 concurrences. Most cited: City of Pekin v. McMahon (143 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. 806 of these were attributed to Magruder 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
1895	City of Pekin v. McMahon†	154 Ill. 141	143
1895	Ritchie v. People†	155 Ill. 98	132
1893	Consolidated Coal Co. v. Haenni†	146 Ill. 614	114
1896	Illinois Steel Co. v. Schymanowski†	162 Ill. 447	101
1892	Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railway Co. v. Bodemer†	139 Ill. 596	100
1895	Minnesota Lumber Co. v. Whitebreast Coal Co.†	160 Ill. 85	97
1887	Scofield v. Olcott†	120 Ill. 362	91
1887	Harmon v. Auditor of Public Accounts†	123 Ill. 122	83
1905	Freund v. Freund†	218 Ill. 189	81
1897	Dahnke v. People†	168 Ill. 102	79
1894	Carlton v. People†	150 Ill. 181	79
1888	Storey v. Storey†	125 Ill. 608	79
1901	City of LaSalle v. Kostka†	190 Ill. 130	77
1897	George v. People· Dissent†	167 Ill. 447	74
1895	Vogel v. Pekoc· Dissent†	157 Ill. 339	73

Showing the 15 most-cited of 815 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 Illinois Supreme Court reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court was Benjamin Drake Magruder on?: Benjamin Drake Magruder was a Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

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21 years on the Illinois Supreme Court. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).