The Illinois State Judges website provides detailed information on all of the state judges sitting during the 2015 calendar year.

Hundreds of judges serve throughout the state, and the recently launched Illinois State Judges website aims to educate users about their backgrounds and how judges are appointed.  

“One of my strongest impulses in creating this website is I looked for some of this information myself and I couldn’t find it,” said Leigh Bienen, director of the Illinois Judges project and senior lecturer at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law.

The website provides an exhaustive look at the Illinois judicial system, including the history of the courts, general information about the types of courts, and maps of the state’s judicial circuit and appellate courts.

It also provides detailed information on all of the state judges sitting during the 2015 calendar year, including identification, legal education, year of bar admission, county of judgeship, dates of appointment, dates of election, political party and legal experience.

“I was partly motivated after watching this cascade of wrongful convictions coming out of Illinois. I said, ‘God, who are these judges convicting these people who later turned out to be found not to be guilty,’” Bienen said of the decision to include a judge’s past legal experience.

Bienen, who’s researched homicides and created the comprehensive Homicide in Chicago 1870-1930 website, was interested in discovering how many judges had worked in state’s attorney’s offices after informally noticing that many had.

“Maybe it’s great training for the judiciary, but it’s certainly partisan. ... It doesn’t mean the judges are partisan or that they aren’t fair, good judges,” she said. “Most of them started their careers in the state’s attorney’s office.”

Bienen said they also looked at the number of judges who worked for a public defender, how many had been in private practice, and those who had other types of experience.

While the information is available to anyone, Bienen anticipates it will be used by lawyers, government officials, clients, political scientists, judges and journalists.

“I hope this information will be widely used. I hope it will be widely distributed, not just by academics, lawyers and law students, but by ordinary people who might decide to look up the judge that has [their] case,” she said. “There are a thousand judges in Illinois, who are they?”

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