Bonnie McGrath remembered

Bonnie McGrath, who passed away unexpectedly just before Christmas (which would have been her 74th birthday), came to the law later in life, having done other things first.

It is not that unusual for lawyers to choose their profession after trying something else for a time. Many lawyers, including a number of judges, have taken up the law after serving as a police officer; one of my many ex-partners worked first as a teacher. After earning degrees in community health education and public health, Bonnie McGrath worked as a telephone installer for a number of years before taking up journalism. She was not licensed as an attorney in Illinois until 1993.

McGrath did not follow a traditional path to the bar.

An obituary posted on the CBS2 website documents some of McGrath's many intersts and, inter alia, links to a tribute posted on Project Onward's Instagram page.

FWIW readers will recall McGrath's several judicial campaigns: She ran countywide in 2010, 2016, and 2020. During that last campaign, McGrath said she was making her sixth run. In addition to the three mentioned here so far, I know McGrath sought an 8th Subcircuit vacancy in 2018. I've somehow missed one, because the only other one I can remember was her countywide run in 1998.

In 1998 McGrath ran as "Bonnie Fitzgerald McGrath" and got roasted for it. Her journalistic contacts and credentials -- including stints with the Chicago Tribune -- did not stop the Tribune from making her the 1998 poster child for all that the Tribune thought wrong about judicial elections.

In those far-off days the Tribune could be counted on doing one, and usually only one, 'news' story in every election cycle, focusing on the real or imagined sins of one particular judicial candidate, which story would then serve as an anchor for the Tribune's biennial scold about Why We Need Merit Selection of Judges. One year, the Tribune singled out a particular judicial candidate because several members of her successful family donated a lot of money to her campaign (she lost, which would have undermined the dire warning of the editorial about money buying judgeships, but the Tribune never noted the irony). In 1998, it was Bonnie's turn, her alleged sin being the attempted exploitation of voter ignorance by adopting "Fitzgerald" as a nickname or middle name just in time for a primary election falling (as it usually does) around the Feast of St. Patrick.

(IIRC, McGrath said she did it on the recommendation of her election lawyer. Who knows? It might even have worked... if the Tribune's Eye of Sauron had not come to focus on her campaign. But that was long ago: Anyone trying a similar tactic today would almost certainly be removed from the ballot. See, here, here, and, most recently, here.)

And why were voters ignorant of the relative qualifications of judicial candidates you may ask? If the Tribune's editors ever asked themselves such a question, they never recognized that the newspaper's policy of running one, and only one, 'news' story during a judicial election cycle, focusing in on only one of many candidates, might be a contributing factor.

But, if McGrath got no special considerations from her fellow journalists, the experience did not sour her on continuing to write, and publish, in the Reader, the Tribune, and elsewhere. In her statement on FWIW concerning her 2020 campaign, McGrath noted that she'd won 25 major journalism awards. She also pointed out, "I won three awards for legal writing from the Chicago Bar Association, and one of my articles was cited in a law review. I did regular columns in the Illinois Bar Journal and the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, and have been on the Chicago Bar Association editorial board for 28 years."

McGrath was still a member of the board of editors of the CBA Record at the time of her passing. I first met her, many years back, when I served a much shorter term on that editorial board. I used to link to her blogsite on Chicago Now from the sidebar here on FWIW. When the Tribune folded Chicago Now a couple of years back, McGrath moved to Substack.

In preparing this article I spent a lot of time trying to locate a lengthy piece that McGrath published on Chicago Now concerning why she stopped participating in judicial evaluations. I can't find it. The links to that article that McGrath provided when she commented here or provided a guest post no longer work.

McGrath had substantive and thoughtful arguments about the biases and limitations of bar association judicial evaluations... but adhering to her principles and declining to participate necessarily resulted in her being rated "not recommended" when she made her later runs.

Despite the automatic opposition of the bar associations to her judicial campaigns, Bonnie McGrath continued to participate in bar activities. In addition to the CBA Record, McGrath chaired several CBA Committees over the years, including the Criminal Law and Bench/Bar Relations committees. Some years back, she was also president of the Decalogue Society of Lawyers.

Bonnie was an interesting person, with a wide and varied acquaintance, and a talent for sharing what she saw and what she remembered... like this Substack piece from 2023, "In 1969, I had to listen to 16-year-old Mandy Patinkin sing Broadway tunes in his South Shore living room because his mother made me...." She will be missed.