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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Illinois Supreme Court / Joined 1966 / Served to 1990

Daniel P. Ward

Justice, Illinois Supreme Court

Daniel P. Ward was a Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1966. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1918–1995
Tenure: 1966–1990 · 24 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1966	Illinois Supreme Court	–	–

Education

DePaul University

Judicial Record

In our data, Ward authored 754 published opinions for the court (1961–1991), plus 64 dissents and 13 concurrences. Most cited: Foutch v. O'BRYANT (1,778 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. 257 of these were attributed to Ward 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
1984	Foutch v. O'BRYANT	459 N.E.2d 958	1,778
1989	People v. Young	538 N.E.2d 453	643
1989	People v. Slim	537 N.E.2d 317	502
1987	Kirk v. Michael Reese Hospital & Medical Center	513 N.E.2d 387	451
1984	People v. Tisler· Concurrence†	469 N.E.2d 147	446
1988	People v. Gacho	522 N.E.2d 1146	359
1983	Material Service Corp. v. Department of Revenue†	98 Ill. 2d 382	356
1989	People v. Flores	538 N.E.2d 481	355
1984	People v. Stewart	473 N.E.2d 1227	354
1990	Meerbrey v. Marshall Field & Co.	564 N.E.2d 1222	325
1974	Cunis v. Brennan	308 N.E.2d 617	324
1983	People v. Williams	454 N.E.2d 220	322
1975	People v. McDonald	343 N.E.2d 489	321
1978	Skinner v. Reed-Prentice Division Package MacHinery Co.· Dissent†	374 N.E.2d 437	313
1971	Fooden v. Board of Governors· Dissent†	272 N.E.2d 497	309

Showing the 15 most-cited of 831 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 Daniel P. Ward on?: Daniel P. Ward was a Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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24 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).