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

The court's current selection method is partisan election.

Appellate Court of Illinois / Joined 1974 / Served to 1995

William Lewis

Justice, Appellate Court of Illinois

William Lewis was a Justice of the Appellate Court of Illinois, who joined the court in 1974. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1974–1995 · 21 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1974	Appellate Court of Illinois	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Lewis authored 273 published opinions for the court (1974–1995), plus 14 dissents and 10 concurrences. Most cited: Jewish Hospital of St. Louis, Missouri v. Boatmen's National Bank (71 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. 92 of these were attributed to Lewis 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
1994	Jewish Hospital of St. Louis, Missouri v. Boatmen's National Bank†	261 Ill. App. 3d 750	71
1993	Kochan v. Owens-Corning Fiberglass Corp.	610 N.E.2d 683	70
1991	Kemner v. Monsanto Co.	576 N.E.2d 1146	59
1994	Jewish Hosp. v. BOARTMEN'S NAT. BANK	633 N.E.2d 1267	57
1988	People v. Hebel	527 N.E.2d 1367	50
1994	State Farm Fire & Casualty Co. v. Watters	644 N.E.2d 492	49
1990	Carona v. Illinois Central Gulf Railroad	561 N.E.2d 239	48
1988	Kohlmeier v. Shelter Insurance Co.	525 N.E.2d 94	48
1994	Kannewurf v. Johns	632 N.E.2d 711	45
1994	Shelbyville Mutual Insurance v. Sunbeam Leisure Products Co.	634 N.E.2d 1319	37
1991	Schnuck Markets, Inc. v. Soffer	572 N.E.2d 1169	37
1990	Schuchman v. Stackable	555 N.E.2d 1012	34
1982	In Re Marriage of Legge	443 N.E.2d 1089	34
1990	People v. Foster	552 N.E.2d 1112	32
1993	People v. Sims	612 N.E.2d 1011	31

Showing the 15 most-cited of 298 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 Appellate Court of Illinois reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is partisan election.
Which court was William Lewis on?: William Lewis was a Justice of the Appellate Court of Illinois.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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21 years on the Appellate Court of Illinois. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).