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 2010 / Active

Joseph Birkett

Justice, Appellate Court of Illinois

Joseph Birkett is a Justice of the Appellate Court of Illinois, serving since 2010. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2010 · 15 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2010	Appellate Court of Illinois	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Birkett authored 22 published opinions for the court (2011–2012). Most cited: People v. McRae (14 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. 1 of these was attributed to Birkett 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
2011	People v. McRae	959 N.E.2d 1245	14
2011	Byrd v. Hamer†	408 Ill. App. 3d 467	12
2011	People v. Dittmar	954 N.E.2d 263	10
2011	People v. Guadarrama	955 N.E.2d 615	9
2011	People v. Damkroger	946 N.E.2d 948	9
2012	BRUEL AND KJAER v. Village of Bensenville	969 N.E.2d 445	6
2012	People v. Nichols	964 N.E.2d 1190	5
2011	Barnett v. LUDWIG AND COMPANY	960 N.E.2d 722	4
2011	People v. KOMES	954 N.E.2d 300	4
2012	People v. Hubbard	964 N.E.2d 646	3
2011	Reddick v. Suits	960 N.E.2d 1182	3
2012	In Re Commitment of Hooker	968 N.E.2d 1087	2
2012	Weber v. COUNTY OFFICERS ELECTORAL BD.	966 N.E.2d 462	2
2011	Donovan v. County of Lake	951 N.E.2d 1256	2
2011	People v. Lee	954 N.E.2d 338	2

Showing the 15 most-cited of 22 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 Joseph Birkett on?: Joseph Birkett 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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15 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).