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 2002 / Active

James Smith

Justice, Appellate Court of Illinois

James Smith is a Justice of the Appellate Court of Illinois, serving since 2002. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2002 · 24 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2002	Appellate Court of Illinois	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Smith authored 429 published opinions for the court (1960–2018), plus 2 dissents. Most cited: People v. Adeline E. (317 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. 40 of these were attributed to Smith 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
2006	People v. Adeline E.	859 N.E.2d 123	317
2004	In Re Jaron Z.	810 N.E.2d 108	144
2003	People v. Lloyd	788 N.E.2d 1169	77
2004	Martens v. MCL Construction Corp.	807 N.E.2d 480	74
1968	Schenk v. Schenk	241 N.E.2d 12	74
2009	Dubey v. Public Storage, Inc.	918 N.E.2d 265	66
2004	People v. T.T.†	351 Ill. App. 3d 976	64
2005	Sandoval v. City of Chicago	830 N.E.2d 722	62
1961	Caley v. Manicke	173 N.E.2d 209	60
2003	People v. Green†	791 N.E.2d 134	59
2011	Gatreaux v. DKW ENTERPRISES, LLC	958 N.E.2d 1088	56
2011	People v. Dorothy H.	945 N.E.2d 81	55
1965	Shore v. Turman	210 N.E.2d 232	55
1971	Kraftco Corp. v. Koblus	274 N.E.2d 153	53
2007	Will v. Northwestern University	881 N.E.2d 481	52

Showing the 15 most-cited of 431 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 is James Smith on?: James Smith is 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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24 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).