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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Illinois Supreme Court / Joined 1970 / Served to 1990

Howard C. Ryan

Justice, Illinois Supreme Court

Howard C. Ryan was a Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1970. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1916–2008
Tenure: 1970–1990 · 20 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1970	Illinois Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Ryan authored 588 published opinions for the court (1951–1995), plus 115 dissents and 51 concurrences. Most cited: People v. Enoch (3,273 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. 287 of these were attributed to Ryan 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
1988	People v. Enoch	522 N.E.2d 1124	3,273
1985	People v. Collins	478 N.E.2d 267	2,507
1984	People v. Albanese· Concurrence†	473 N.E.2d 1246	1,967
1976	First Capitol Mortgage Corp. v. Talandis Construction Corp.	345 N.E.2d 493	1,536
1977	People v. Perruquet	368 N.E.2d 882	1,410
1986	Purtill v. Hess	489 N.E.2d 867	1,151
1978	Kelsay v. Motorola, Inc.	384 N.E.2d 353	966
1990	Ward v. K Mart Corp.	554 N.E.2d 223	673
1980	People v. Carlson	404 N.E.2d 233	666
1981	Palmateer v. International Harvester Co.· Dissent†	421 N.E.2d 876	657
1973	People v. Pickett†	296 N.E.2d 856	647
1981	Knox College v. Celotex Corp.	430 N.E.2d 976	605
1972	People v. Prim†	289 N.E.2d 601	576
1984	People v. Zehr· Dissent†	469 N.E.2d 1062	513
1978	People v. Nicholls	374 N.E.2d 194	479

Showing the 15 most-cited of 754 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 Howard C. Ryan on?: Howard C. Ryan 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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20 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).