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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Illinois Supreme Court / Joined 1976 / Served to 1992

Thomas J. Moran

Justice, Illinois Supreme Court

Thomas J. Moran was a Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1976. He previously served on the Appellate Court of Illinois. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1920–1995
Tenure: 1976–1992 · 16 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1964	Appellate Court of Illinois	–	–
1976	Illinois Supreme Court	–	–

Education

Lake Forest College
Lake Forest College

Judicial Record

In our data, Moran authored 1,516 published opinions for the court (1957–1992), plus 119 dissents and 34 concurrences. Most cited: People v. King (1,292 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. 537 of these were attributed to Moran 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
1977	People v. King	363 N.E.2d 838	1,292
1982	Moorman Manufacturing Co. v. National Tank Co.	435 N.E.2d 443	846
1992	Maple v. Gustafson	603 N.E.2d 508	703
1987	Duldulao v. Saint Mary of Nazareth Hospital Center	505 N.E.2d 314	471
1981	Wilson v. Clark	417 N.E.2d 1322	460
1992	Lee v. Chicago Transit Authority· Dissent†	605 N.E.2d 493	416
1981	Alvis v. Ribar	421 N.E.2d 886	400
1979	People v. Baptist	389 N.E.2d 1200	355
1991	People v. Streit	566 N.E.2d 1351	348
1981	People v. Lewis· Concurrence†	430 N.E.2d 1346	340
1985	Western Casualty & Surety Co. v. Brochu	475 N.E.2d 872	325
1984	People v. Jordan	469 N.E.2d 569	324
1991	People v. Steidl	568 N.E.2d 837	307
1980	People v. Greer· Concurrence†	402 N.E.2d 203	298
1992	People v. Pasch	604 N.E.2d 294	295

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,669 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 J. Moran on?: Thomas J. Moran 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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16 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).