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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Illinois Supreme Court / Joined 1980 / Served to 1988

Seymour Simon

Justice, Illinois Supreme Court

Seymour Simon was a Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1980. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1915–2006
Tenure: 1980–1988 · 8 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1980	Illinois Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Northwestern State University of Louisiana
Northwestern State University of Louisiana

Judicial Record

In our data, Simon authored 218 published opinions for the court (1958–1988), plus 135 dissents and 82 concurrences. Most cited: People v. Enoch (3,273 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. 249 of these were attributed to Simon 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
1988	People v. Enoch· Concurrence†	522 N.E.2d 1124	3,273
1985	People v. Collins· Dissent†	478 N.E.2d 267	2,507
1984	People v. Albanese· Concurrence†	473 N.E.2d 1246	1,967
1982	Moorman Manufacturing Co. v. National Tank Co.· Concurrence†	435 N.E.2d 443	846
1981	Palmateer v. International Harvester Co.	421 N.E.2d 876	657
1983	People v. Free· Concurrence†	447 N.E.2d 218	459
1987	Kirk v. Michael Reese Hospital & Medical Center· Concurrence†	513 N.E.2d 387	451
1984	People v. Caballero· Dissent†	464 N.E.2d 223	434
1988	People v. Gacho· Dissent†	522 N.E.2d 1146	359
1984	People v. Stewart· Concurrence†	473 N.E.2d 1227	354
1981	People v. Lewis· Dissent†	430 N.E.2d 1346	340
1984	People v. Stewart· Concurrence†	473 N.E.2d 840	323
1983	People v. Bartall	456 N.E.2d 59	298
1987	People v. Shum· Dissent†	512 N.E.2d 1183	292
1988	People v. Porter· Dissent†	521 N.E.2d 1158	291

Showing the 15 most-cited of 435 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 Seymour Simon on?: Seymour Simon 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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8 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).