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 1974 / Served to 1987

John Karns

Justice, Appellate Court of Illinois

John Karns was a Justice of the Appellate Court of Illinois, who joined the court in 1974. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1974–1987 · 13 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1974	Appellate Court of Illinois	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Karns authored 596 published opinions for the court (1975–1988), plus 37 dissents and 14 concurrences. Most cited: People v. Scott (70 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. 157 of these were attributed to Karns 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
1987	People v. Scott	505 N.E.2d 42	70
1977	Moore v. McDaniel	362 N.E.2d 382	63
1982	Whitehead v. Fleet Towing Co.	442 N.E.2d 1362	62
1976	People v. Rayford· Dissent†	356 N.E.2d 1274	62
1980	People v. Cornes	399 N.E.2d 1346	59
1976	O'Fallon Development Co. v. City of O'Fallon	356 N.E.2d 1293	56
1976	LaMonte v. City of Belleville	355 N.E.2d 70	55
1975	Fopay v. Noveroske	334 N.E.2d 79	55
1985	Trovillion v. United States Fidelity & Guaranty Co.	474 N.E.2d 953	54
1983	Mattis v. State Farm Fire & Casualty Co.	454 N.E.2d 1156	49
1977	Kerns v. Engelke	369 N.E.2d 1284	49
1979	Rusher v. Smith	388 N.E.2d 906	46
1977	People v. Taylor	369 N.E.2d 573	45
1977	Kitsch v. Goode	362 N.E.2d 446	44
1986	Slover v. Brown	488 N.E.2d 1103	43

Showing the 15 most-cited of 647 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 was John Karns on?: John Karns was 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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13 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).