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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Illinois Supreme Court / Joined 1909 / Served to 1918

George A. Cooke

Justice, Illinois Supreme Court

George A. Cooke was a Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court (7 judges, selected by partisan election), who joined the court in 1909. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1869–1938
Tenure: 1909–1918 · 9 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1909	Illinois Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Knox College

Judicial Record

In our data, Cooke authored 425 published opinions for the court (1909–1931), plus 7 dissents. Most cited: Fergus v. Russel (235 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. 431 of these were attributed to Cooke 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
1915	Fergus v. Russel†	270 Ill. 304	235
1918	McDonald v. City of Spring Valley†	285 Ill. 52	106
1910	Zeigler v. Illinois Trust & Savings Bank†	245 Ill. 180	105
1916	Weisguth v. Supreme Tribe of Ben Hur†	272 Ill. 541	69
1914	Deibeikis v. Link-Belt Co.†	261 Ill. 454	65
1918	N. K. Fairbank Co. v. Industrial Commission†	285 Ill. 11	55
1914	Scown v. Czarnecki· Dissent†	264 Ill. 305	50
1910	People v. McCann· Dissent†	247 Ill. 130	48
1910	Lauth v. Chicago Union Traction Co.†	244 Ill. 244	45
1915	Hutton v. States Accident Insurance†	267 Ill. 267	43
1917	City of Chicago v. O'Connell†	278 Ill. 591	41
1911	Jones v. Sanitary District†	252 Ill. 591	40
1918	Monahan v. Metropolitan Life Insurance†	283 Ill. 136	39
1913	Baker v. Baker†	258 Ill. 418	39
1917	Illinois Life Insurance v. Prentiss†	277 Ill. 383	38

Showing the 15 most-cited of 433 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 George A. Cooke on?: George A. Cooke 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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9 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).