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 1988 / Served to 2014

Michael McCuskey

Justice, Appellate Court of Illinois

Michael McCuskey was a Justice of the Appellate Court of Illinois, who joined the court in 1988. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1988–2014 · 26 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1988	Appellate Court of Illinois	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, McCuskey authored 224 published opinions for the court (1991–1998), plus 7 dissents and 6 concurrences. Most cited: People v. Koutsakis (78 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. 90 of these were attributed to McCuskey 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
1995	People v. Koutsakis	649 N.E.2d 605	78
1994	People v. Aguilar· Dissent†	637 N.E.2d 1221	78
1997	People v. Moore	676 N.E.2d 700	54
1996	Jacobson v. Buffalo Rock Shooters Supply, Inc.	664 N.E.2d 328	53
1997	People v. Perez	681 N.E.2d 173	47
1993	People v. Koutsakis	627 N.E.2d 388	46
1997	People v. Easley	680 N.E.2d 776	41
1995	Wind v. Hy-Vee Food Stores, Inc.	650 N.E.2d 258	38
1992	In Re Marriage of Pfeiffer· Dissent†	604 N.E.2d 1069	37
1993	People v. Brown	610 N.E.2d 776	34
1992	People v. Cardenas	604 N.E.2d 953	34
1997	People v. Sanchez	686 N.E.2d 367	33
1997	People v. Courtney	687 N.E.2d 521	31
1996	Couch v. State Farm Insurance	666 N.E.2d 24	29
1993	Alvarez v. Fred Hintze Construction	617 N.E.2d 821	28

Showing the 15 most-cited of 237 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 Michael McCuskey on?: Michael McCuskey 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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26 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).