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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Illinois Supreme Court / Joined 1947 / Served to 1951

Jessie L. Simpson

Justice, Illinois Supreme Court

Jessie L. Simpson was a Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1947. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1884–1973
Tenure: 1947–1951 · 4 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1947	Illinois Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Simpson authored 129 published opinions for the court (1947–1951), plus 1 dissent. Most cited: Johnston v. City of East Moline (98 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. 25 of these were attributed to Simpson 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
1950	Johnston v. City of East Moline	91 N.E.2d 401	98
1950	People v. Dale†	92 N.E.2d 761	89
1947	Cedar Park Cemetery Ass'n v. Village of Calumet Park	75 N.E.2d 874	64
1950	Smith v. Board of Education of Oswego Community High School District†	405 Ill. 143	58
1948	Briney v. Illinois Central Railroad	81 N.E.2d 866	58
1950	People v. Scott	95 N.E.2d 315	51
1949	People Ex Rel. Illinois State Bar Ass'n v. Schafer	87 N.E.2d 773	49
1950	People v. Levisen· Dissent†	90 N.E.2d 213	42
1949	Clubb v. Clubb	84 N.E.2d 366	42
1949	Saddler v. Nat. Bank of Bloomington	85 N.E.2d 733	42
1951	People v. Niemoth	98 N.E.2d 733	39
1950	Wynekoop v. Wynekoop†	95 N.E.2d 457	36
1950	Wesemann v. Village of La Grange Park	94 N.E.2d 904	34
1948	People v. Hobbs	79 N.E.2d 202	28
1949	John T. Dempsey Public Administrator v. National Life & Accident Insurance	88 N.E.2d 874	27

Showing the 15 most-cited of 130 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 Jessie L. Simpson on?: Jessie L. Simpson 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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4 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).