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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Illinois Supreme Court / Joined 1888 / Served to 1907

Jacob W. Wilkin

Justice, Illinois Supreme Court

Jacob W. Wilkin was a Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1888. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1837–1907
Tenure: 1888–1907 · 19 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1888	Illinois Supreme Court	–	–

Education

McKendree University

Judicial Record

In our data, Wilkin authored 973 published opinions for the court (1888–1907), plus 11 dissents and 3 concurrences. Most cited: Crerar v. Williams (92 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. 984 of these were attributed to Wilkin 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
1893	Crerar v. Williams†	145 Ill. 625	92
1900	Thomas v. Whitney†	186 Ill. 225	71
1890	Woman's Union Missionary Society of America v. Mead†	131 Ill. 338	71
1901	Arms v. Ayer†	192 Ill. 601	70
1905	City of Chicago v. Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance†	218 Ill. 40	58
1896	Doane v. Lake Street Elevated Railroad†	165 Ill. 510	58
1889	Schneider v. Turner†	130 Ill. 28	55
1904	Orr v. Yates†	209 Ill. 222	54
1895	Parker v. Orr†	158 Ill. 609	54
1895	People ex rel. Smith v. Allen†	155 Ill. 61	53
1893	Illinois Central Railroad v. Nowicki†	148 Ill. 29	53
1906	White Star Mining Co. v. Hultberg†	220 Ill. 578	52
1901	International Committee of Young Women's Christian Ass'n v. Young Women's Christian Ass'n· Dissent†	194 Ill. 194	52
1894	Kadish v. Garden City Equitable Loan & Building Ass'n†	151 Ill. 531	52
1888	Plumb v. Campbell†	129 Ill. 101	49

Showing the 15 most-cited of 989 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 Jacob W. Wilkin on?: Jacob W. Wilkin 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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19 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).