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 / Served to 2010

Thomas R. Fitzgerald

Justice, Illinois Supreme Court

Thomas R. Fitzgerald was a Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court, who joined the court in 2000. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 2000–2010 · 10 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2000	Illinois Supreme Court	–	–

Education

The John Marshall Law School

Judicial Record

In our data, Fitzgerald authored 163 published opinions for the court (2001–2010), plus 14 dissents and 8 concurrences. Most cited: People v. Herron (1,578 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. 42 of these were attributed to Fitzgerald 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
2005	People v. Herron	830 N.E.2d 467	1,578
2001	People v. Edwards· Concurrence†	757 N.E.2d 442	888
2004	People v. Evans	808 N.E.2d 939	785
2004	People v. Brenda T.†	212 Ill. 2d 347	659
2001	AFM Messenger Service, Inc. v. Department of Employment Security	763 N.E.2d 272	635
2002	Belleville Toyota, Inc. v. Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc.	770 N.E.2d 177	631
2007	People v. Perry· Dissent†	864 N.E.2d 196	553
2009	People v. Glasper	917 N.E.2d 401	483
2005	People v. Blair	831 N.E.2d 604	468
2006	People v. Sutherland	860 N.E.2d 178	465
2001	People v. Diane N.†	196 Ill. 2d 181	433
2002	People v. Miller	781 N.E.2d 300	408
2005	People v. Collins	824 N.E.2d 262	402
2002	Sarkissian v. Chicago Board of Education· Dissent†	776 N.E.2d 195	363
2003	Van Meter v. Darien Park District· Dissent†	207 Ill. 2d 359	359

Showing the 15 most-cited of 185 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 Thomas R. Fitzgerald on?: Thomas R. Fitzgerald 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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10 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).