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 1895

Joseph M. Bailey

Justice, Illinois Supreme Court

Joseph M. Bailey was a Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1888. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1833–1895
Tenure: 1888–1895 · 7 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1888	Illinois Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Bailey authored 239 published opinions for the court (1888–1895), plus 4 dissents and 2 concurrences. Most cited: Hale v. Hale (117 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. 243 of these were attributed to Bailey 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	Hale v. Hale†	146 Ill. 227	117
1893	Libby, McNeill & Libby v. Scherman†	146 Ill. 540	89
1893	Lambert v. Alcorn†	144 Ill. 313	76
1891	People ex rel. Morrison v. Cregier†	138 Ill. 401	68
1888	Watt v. People†	126 Ill. 9	61
1891	Chicago City Railway Co. v. Wilcox†	138 Ill. 370	60
1889	Terre Haute & Indianapolis Railroad v. Voelker†	129 Ill. 540	59
1889	Continental Insurance v. Ruckman†	127 Ill. 364	59
1895	Grier v. Cable†	159 Ill. 29	58
1891	Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railway Co. v. Ward†	135 Ill. 511	56
1891	Misch v. Russell†	136 Ill. 22	53
1892	Ogle v. Koerner†	140 Ill. 170	50
1890	Comrs. of Mason v. Griffin†	134 Ill. 330	48
1889	Sanford v. Kane†	127 Ill. 591	44
1889	Tyler v. Sanborn· Dissent†	128 Ill. 136	43

Showing the 15 most-cited of 245 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 Joseph M. Bailey on?: Joseph M. Bailey 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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7 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).