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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Illinois Supreme Court / Joined 1906 / Served to 1931

William M. Farmer

Justice, Illinois Supreme Court

William M. Farmer was a Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1906. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1853–1931
Tenure: 1906–1931 · 25 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1906	Illinois Supreme Court	–	–

Education

McKendree University
Northwestern University

Judicial Record

In our data, Farmer authored 1,215 published opinions for the court (1906–1931), plus 39 dissents and 3 concurrences. 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. 973 of these were attributed to Farmer 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
1925	Brown v. Illinois Terminal Co.	150 N.E. 242	77
1913	Lindsay v. Lindsay†	257 Ill. 328	71
1930	Wolczek v. Public Service Co.· Dissent	174 N.E. 577	68
1909	Selden v. Illinois Trust & Savings Bank†	239 Ill. 67	62
1917	Barnett v. Caldwell Furniture Co.†	277 Ill. 286	61
1909	Fox v. Ryan†	240 Ill. 391	57
1925	Densby v. Bartlett	149 N.E. 591	51
1924	People ex rel. Pearsall v. Catholic Bishop†	311 Ill. 11	51
1923	West Suburban Transportation Co. v. Chicago & West Towns Railway Co.†	309 Ill. 87	51
1922	Rothwell v. Taylor†	303 Ill. 226	51
1914	Scown v. Czarnecki· Dissent†	264 Ill. 305	50
1925	The People v. Black	148 N.E. 281	49
1910	People v. McCann†	247 Ill. 130	48
1921	People v. Crenshaw†	298 Ill. 412	47

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,257 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 William M. Farmer on?: William M. Farmer 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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25 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).