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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Illinois Supreme Court / Joined 1962 / Served to 1984

Robert C. Underwood

Justice, Illinois Supreme Court

Robert C. Underwood was a Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1962. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1915–1988
Tenure: 1962–1984 · 22 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1962	Illinois Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Underwood authored 704 published opinions for the court (1962–1984), plus 126 dissents and 44 concurrences. Most cited: Pedrick v. Peoria & Eastern Railroad (2,326 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. 408 of these were attributed to Underwood 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
1967	Pedrick v. Peoria & Eastern Railroad	229 N.E.2d 504	2,326
1984	People v. Albanese	473 N.E.2d 1246	1,967
1978	Kelsay v. Motorola, Inc.· Concurrence†	384 N.E.2d 353	966
1982	People v. La Pointe	431 N.E.2d 344	680
1980	People v. Carlson· Concurrence†	404 N.E.2d 233	666
1981	Palmateer v. International Harvester Co.· Dissent†	421 N.E.2d 876	657
1979	People v. Taylor	391 N.E.2d 366	560
1965	Darling v. Charleston Community Memorial Hospital· Concurrence†	211 N.E.2d 253	487
1964	Nelson v. Union Wire Rope Corp.· Dissent†	199 N.E.2d 769	429
1981	Alvis v. Ribar· Dissent†	421 N.E.2d 886	400
1969	Rozny v. Marnul†	250 N.E.2d 656	360
1980	People v. Lindgren· Dissent†	402 N.E.2d 238	352
1981	People v. Lewis	430 N.E.2d 1346	340
1970	Williams v. Brown Manufacturing Co.	261 N.E.2d 305	327
1981	Witherell v. Weimer	421 N.E.2d 869	325

Showing the 15 most-cited of 874 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 C. Underwood on?: Robert C. Underwood 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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22 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).