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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Illinois Supreme Court / Joined 1966 / Served to 1980

Thomas E. Kluczynski

Justice, Illinois Supreme Court

Thomas E. Kluczynski was a Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1966. He previously served on the Appellate Court of Illinois. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1903–1994
Tenure: 1966–1980 · 14 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1962	Appellate Court of Illinois	–	–
1966	Illinois Supreme Court	–	–

Education

University of Chicago

Judicial Record

In our data, Kluczynski authored 485 published opinions for the court (1964–1980), plus 31 dissents and 2 concurrences. Most cited: People v. Cox (580 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. 197 of these were attributed to Kluczynski 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
1980	People v. Cox	412 N.E.2d 541	580
1980	People v. Lindgren· Dissent†	402 N.E.2d 238	352
1970	Ingersoll v. Klein	262 N.E.2d 593	316
1971	Fooden v. Board of Governors	272 N.E.2d 497	309
1978	People v. Murphy	381 N.E.2d 677	307
1979	People v. Berland	385 N.E.2d 649	287
1976	Genaust v. Illinois Power Co.	343 N.E.2d 465	279
1975	Kravis v. Smith Marine, Inc.	324 N.E.2d 417	272
1978	Walski v. Tiesenga	381 N.E.2d 279	218
1976	People v. Bratcher	349 N.E.2d 31	200
1974	Berry v. G. D. Searle & Co.	309 N.E.2d 550	185
1973	People v. Harvey†	294 N.E.2d 269	181
1976	Kobylanski v. Chicago Board of Education	347 N.E.2d 705	172
1980	People v. Meeks†	81 Ill. 2d 524	169
1972	Jack Spring, Inc. v. Little· Dissent†	280 N.E.2d 208	163

Showing the 15 most-cited of 518 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 E. Kluczynski on?: Thomas E. Kluczynski 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

See something wrong? Report an error. Fixes are logged in the corrections log.

14 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).