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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Illinois Supreme Court / Joined 1900 / Served to 1913

John P. Hand

Justice, Illinois Supreme Court

John P. Hand was a Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1900. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1850–1923
Tenure: 1900–1913 · 13 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1900	Illinois Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Hand authored 705 published opinions for the court (1900–1912), plus 7 dissents and 3 concurrences. Most cited: Franklin Union No. 4 v. People (104 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. 710 of these were attributed to Hand 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
1906	Franklin Union No. 4 v. People†	220 Ill. 355	104
1904	Illinois Central Railroad v. Smith†	208 Ill. 608	79
1908	Greinke v. Chicago City Railway Co.†	234 Ill. 564	70
1905	B. Shoninger Co. v. Mann†	219 Ill. 242	67
1909	Wilkinson v. Ætna Life Insurance†	240 Ill. 205	63
1907	Rouse v. Thompson†	228 Ill. 522	63
1902	Beidler v. Branshaw†	200 Ill. 425	61
1907	Calvert v. Springfield Electric Light & Power Co.†	231 Ill. 290	57
1908	Harder's Fire Proof Storage & Van Co. v. City of Chicago†	235 Ill. 58	56
1901	Springer v. Ford†	189 Ill. 430	54
1905	Joyce v. City of Chicago†	216 Ill. 466	53
1901	International Committee of Young Women's Christian Ass'n v. Young Women's Christian Ass'n†	194 Ill. 194	52
1901	Vail v. Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance†	192 Ill. 567	50
1901	Johnson v. Askey†	190 Ill. 58	50
1902	Vance v. Rankin†	194 Ill. 625	49

Showing the 15 most-cited of 715 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 John P. Hand on?: John P. Hand 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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13 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).