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

Thomas L. Kilbride

Justice, Illinois Supreme Court

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

Tenure: 2000 · 26 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2000	Illinois Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Saint Mary's College

Judicial Record

In our data, Kilbride authored 162 published opinions for the court (2001–2017), plus 49 dissents and 45 concurrences. Most cited: People v. Thompson (973 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. 122 of these were attributed to Kilbride 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
2010	People v. Thompson	939 N.E.2d 403	973
2002	People v. Boclair	789 N.E.2d 734	446
2004	People v. Harvey	813 N.E.2d 181	422
2007	People v. Vincent· Dissent†	226 Ill. 2d 1	420
2002	Robinson v. Toyota Motor Credit Corp.	775 N.E.2d 951	410
2002	Robidoux v. Oliphant· Dissent†	775 N.E.2d 987	370
2008	People v. Perkins	890 N.E.2d 398	365
2009	Blum v. Koster	919 N.E.2d 333	364
2003	Van Meter v. Darien Park District†	207 Ill. 2d 359	359
2009	People v. Lewis	912 N.E.2d 1220	352
2003	People v. Crespo· Dissent†	788 N.E.2d 1117	340
2005	People v. Hall	841 N.E.2d 913	307
2008	People v. Bannister· Dissent†	902 N.E.2d 571	294
2005	Corral v. Mervis Industries, Inc.	839 N.E.2d 524	294
2010	People v. Brown	923 N.E.2d 748	292

Showing the 15 most-cited of 256 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 L. Kilbride on?: Thomas L. Kilbride 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).