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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Appellate Court of Illinois / Joined 1970 / Served to 1992

Francis S. Lorenz

Justice, Appellate Court of Illinois

Francis S. Lorenz was a Justice of the Appellate Court of Illinois, who joined the court in 1970. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1919–2008
Tenure: 1970–1992 · 22 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1970	Appellate Court of Illinois	–	–

Education

DePaul University

Judicial Record

In our data, Lorenz authored 952 published opinions for the court (1971–1992), plus 4 dissents and 9 concurrences. Most cited: People v. Harbold (96 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. 274 of these were attributed to Lorenz 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	People v. Harbold	464 N.E.2d 734	96
1978	Perlman v. Time, Inc.	380 N.E.2d 1040	93
1980	Newell v. Field Enterprises, Inc.	415 N.E.2d 434	84
1980	Edens View Realty & Investment, Inc. v. Heritage Enterprises, Inc.	408 N.E.2d 1069	76
1981	Corti v. Fleisher	417 N.E.2d 764	74
1982	Graham v. Mimms	444 N.E.2d 549	73
1981	Milton v. Illinois Bell Telephone Co.	427 N.E.2d 829	66
1974	Colony Press, Inc. v. Fleeman	308 N.E.2d 78	64
1981	Havens v. Miller	429 N.E.2d 1292	63
1982	Nicholl v. Scaletta	432 N.E.2d 1267	62
1982	Ainsworth Corp. v. Cenco, Inc.	437 N.E.2d 817	60
1983	Chicago Title & Trust Co. v. First Arlington National Bank	454 N.E.2d 723	58
1978	Browder v. Hanley Dawson Cadillac Co.	379 N.E.2d 1206	56
1974	Wood Acceptance Co. v. King	309 N.E.2d 403	56
1989	People v. Jones	541 N.E.2d 132	55

Showing the 15 most-cited of 965 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 Appellate Court of Illinois reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court was Francis S. Lorenz on?: Francis S. Lorenz was a Justice of the Appellate Court of Illinois.

Sources

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

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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