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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Illinois Supreme Court / Joined 1870 / Served to 1885

Benjamin R. Sheldon

Justice, Illinois Supreme Court

Benjamin R. Sheldon was a Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1870. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1811–1897
Tenure: 1870–1885 · 15 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1870	Illinois Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Williams College
Yale University

Judicial Record

In our data, Sheldon authored 850 published opinions for the court (1870–1886), plus 19 dissents and 9 concurrences. Most cited: People v. Wilson (103 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. 877 of these were attributed to Sheldon 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
1872	People v. Wilson· Dissent†	64 Ill. 195	103
1874	Illinois Central Railroad v. Godfrey†	71 Ill. 500	99
1881	City of East St. Louis v. East St. Louis Gas Light & Coke Co.†	98 Ill. 415	92
1884	Chicago & Eastern Illinois Railroad v. Loeb†	118 Ill. 203	90
1873	Town of Lake View v. Rose Hill Cemetery Co.· Dissent†	70 Ill. 191	82
1881	Keegan v. Geraghty†	101 Ill. 26	77
1884	Simmons v. Chicago & Tomah Railroad†	110 Ill. 340	75
1874	Wadhams v. Flagler Gay†	73 Ill. 415	73
1875	Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad v. City of Joliet†	79 Ill. 25	68
1883	Davis v. Hamlin†	108 Ill. 39	65
1875	City of Beardstown v. City of Virginia†	76 Ill. 34	64
1874	Camp Point Manufacturing Co. v. Ballou†	71 Ill. 417	60
1881	Clinton Wire Cloth Co. v. Gardner†	99 Ill. 151	59
1882	In re Ferrier†	103 Ill. 367	57
1875	City of Chicago v. McGiven†	78 Ill. 347	51

Showing the 15 most-cited of 878 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 R. Sheldon on?: Benjamin R. Sheldon was a Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court.

Sources

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15 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).