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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Illinois Supreme Court / Joined 1915 / Served to 1938

Warren W. Duncan

Justice, Illinois Supreme Court

Warren W. Duncan was a Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1915. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1857–1938
Tenure: 1915–1938 · 23 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1915	Illinois Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Duncan authored 657 published opinions for the court (1915–1933), plus 18 dissents and 1 concurrence. Most cited: Fergus v. Russel (235 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. 425 of these were attributed to Duncan 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
1915	Fergus v. Russel· Dissent†	270 Ill. 304	235
1928	Wilcox v. Bierd	162 N.E. 170	101
1921	Stewart v. Brady· Dissent	133 N.E. 310	99
1933	Winter v. Barrett· Dissent	186 N.E. 113	90
1923	People v. Brocamp†	307 Ill. 448	85
1931	The People v. Bruner· Dissent	175 N.E. 400	78
1925	The People v. Fox· Dissent	150 N.E. 847	66
1922	People v. Rogers†	303 Ill. 578	64
1927	The People v. Scott	157 N.E. 247	61
1925	The People v. Small· Dissent	150 N.E. 435	59
1920	Chapman v. North American Life Insurance†	292 Ill. 179	58
1918	People ex rel. Jacobs v. Coffin†	282 Ill. 599	58
1927	The People v. Crooks	157 N.E. 218	52
1933	Rosehill Cemetery Co. v. City of Chicago	185 N.E. 170	51
1922	Pocahontas Mining Co. v. Industrial Commission†	301 Ill. 462	51

Showing the 15 most-cited of 676 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 Warren W. Duncan on?: Warren W. Duncan 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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23 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).