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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Illinois Supreme Court / Joined 1942 / Served to 1954

William john Fulton

Justice, Illinois Supreme Court

William john Fulton was a Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court, who joined the court in 1942. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1875–1961
Tenure: 1942–1954 · 12 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1942	Illinois Supreme Court	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Fulton authored 395 published opinions for the court (1942–1954), plus 1 dissent. Most cited: Drezner v. Civil Service Commission (97 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. 77 of these were attributed to Fulton 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
1947	Drezner v. Civil Service Commission	75 N.E.2d 303	97
1954	Du Bois v. Gibbons†	118 N.E.2d 295	79
1953	People v. Dolgin	114 N.E.2d 389	73
1945	Anderson v. Board of Education	61 N.E.2d 562	72
1953	Jackson v. First National Bank	114 N.E.2d 721	71
1943	People Ex Rel. Barrett v. Bartley	50 N.E.2d 517	69
1953	Barnhart v. Barnhart†	114 N.E.2d 378	68
1945	McDougall v. Lueder	58 N.E.2d 899	61
1943	Stephens v. Kasten	48 N.E.2d 508	58
1953	Riccitelli v. Sternfeld	115 N.E.2d 288	55
1953	Mitchell v. Van Scoyk†	115 N.E.2d 226	49
1952	Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. v. Tierney	104 N.E.2d 222	47
1945	Brod v. Brod	61 N.E.2d 675	47
1945	People Ex Rel. Kunstman v. Nagano	59 N.E.2d 96	46
1954	People v. Bennett	121 N.E.2d 595	44

Showing the 15 most-cited of 396 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 john Fulton on?: William john Fulton 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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12 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).