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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Illinois Supreme Court / Joined 2010 / Former Justice

Mary Jane Theis

Justice, Illinois Supreme Court

Mary Jane Theis was a Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court, who joined the court in 2010. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 2010 · 16 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2010	Illinois Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Loyola University Chicago

Judicial Record

In our data, Theis authored 25 published opinions for the court (2010–2018), plus 1 concurrence. Most cited: People v. Holman (474 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. 8 of these were attributed to Theis 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
2017	People v. Holman†	2017 IL 120655	474
2017	People v. Peterson†	2017 IL 120331	233
2011	General Motors Corp. v. Pappas	950 N.E.2d 1136	200
2018	People v. Coats†	2018 IL 121926	180
2017	People v. Wright†	2017 IL 119561	171
2011	People v. Beauchamp	944 N.E.2d 319	167
2017	People v. Hunter†	2017 IL 121306	128
2012	Wilson v. County of Cook	968 N.E.2d 641	107
2011	Ries v. City of Chicago· Concurrence†	242 Ill. 2d 205	67
2017	People v. Boykins†	2017 IL 121365	62
2011	Jablonski v. Ford Motor Co.	955 N.E.2d 1138	50
2012	People v. Baskerville	963 N.E.2d 898	32
2011	People v. Phillips	950 N.E.2d 1126	32
2011	First American Bank Corp. v. Henry	942 N.E.2d 1262	24
2011	People v. Alsup	948 N.E.2d 24	24

Showing the 15 most-cited of 26 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 Mary Jane Theis on?: Mary Jane Theis 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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16 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).