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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Illinois Supreme Court / Joined 1935 / Served to 1951

Francis S. Wilson

Justice, Illinois Supreme Court

Francis S. Wilson was a Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1935. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1872–1951
Tenure: 1935–1951 · 15 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1935	Illinois Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Wilson authored 572 published opinions for the court (1935–1964), plus 18 dissents and 3 concurrences. Most cited: Howlett v. Doglio (130 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. 31 of these were attributed to Wilson 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
1949	Howlett v. Doglio	83 N.E.2d 708	130
1943	Bartolucci v. Falleti	46 N.E.2d 980	123
1942	Briske v. Village of Burnham	39 N.E.2d 976	108
1950	Winston v. Zoning Board of Appeals of Peoria County†	95 N.E.2d 864	101
1946	The People v. Watson	68 N.E.2d 265	94
1937	Blumb v. Getz	8 N.E.2d 620	88
1937	The People v. Allen	14 N.E.2d 397	79
1941	Superior Coal Co. v. Department of Finance	36 N.E.2d 354	74
1945	Weinstein v. Metropolitan Life Insurance	60 N.E.2d 207	71
1936	Joseph Triner Corp. v. McNeil	2 N.E.2d 929	70
1940	Storen v. City of Chicago	27 N.E.2d 53	69
1951	Ridgely v. Central Pipe Line Co.	97 N.E.2d 817	65
1950	People v. Edge	94 N.E.2d 359	65
1935	Kocsis v. Chicago Park District	198 N.E. 847	65
1950	People v. Maffioli	94 N.E.2d 191	62

Showing the 15 most-cited of 593 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 Francis S. Wilson on?: Francis S. Wilson 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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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).