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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Illinois Supreme Court / Joined 2000 / Former Justice

Robert R. Thomas

Justice, Illinois Supreme Court

Robert R. Thomas was a Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court, who joined the court in 2000. They previously served on the Superior Court of California, County of Los Angeles and Superior Court of California, County of Orange. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 2000 · 26 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1982	Superior Court of California, County of Los Angeles	–	–
1990	Superior Court of California, County of Orange	–	–
2000	Illinois Supreme Court	–	–

Education

University of Notre Dame

Judicial Record

In our data, Thomas authored 191 published opinions for the court (1964–2018), plus 33 dissents and 20 concurrences. Most cited: People v. Piatkowski (1,534 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. 82 of these were attributed to Thomas 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
2007	People v. Piatkowski	870 N.E.2d 403	1,534
2010	People v. Hillier	931 N.E.2d 1184	760
2006	People v. Luedemann	857 N.E.2d 187	525
2011	Thompson v. Gordon	948 N.E.2d 39	482
2007	Gallagher v. Lenart· Concurrence†	874 N.E.2d 43	481
2010	People v. Givens	934 N.E.2d 470	460
2005	People v. Sharpe	839 N.E.2d 492	456
2002	People v. Boclair· Concurrence†	789 N.E.2d 734	446
2001	People v. Sorenson	752 N.E.2d 1078	440
2008	People v. Naylor· Dissent†	893 N.E.2d 653	437
2005	People v. Whitfield· Concurrence†	840 N.E.2d 658	424
2004	Home Insurance v. Cincinnati Insurance	821 N.E.2d 269	365
2002	Sarkissian v. Chicago Board of Education· Dissent†	776 N.E.2d 195	363
2004	People v. Pitman· Dissent†	813 N.E.2d 93	346
2003	Snelson v. Kamm	787 N.E.2d 796	343

Showing the 15 most-cited of 244 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 Robert R. Thomas on?: Robert R. Thomas 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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26 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).