Updated grids for countywide judicial candidates issued by the Alliance

The 13-member Alliance of Bar Associations for Judicial Screening has released updated candidate ratings for the forthcoming primary. This post will cover Alliance ratings of countywide judicial candidates; in the next post, we'll look at the Alliance ratings of subcircuit candidates. The ratings are now essentially complete; the "blanks" that remain in the grids exist because a few candidates are pursuing appeals of their ratings with the issuing bar group. (While the Alliance conducts joint investigations and interviews of Cook County judicial candidates, each bar group issues its own ratings and has its own process for addressing appeals from those ratings.)

The grids reproduced below and in the next post show ratings for every candidate in the Democratic Primary. There are no ratings of Republican candidates because no one filed to run for any judicial vacancy in the 2026 Cook County Republican primary. At least when it comes to judicial elections, there is no two-party system in our fair county. Four of the six countywide judicial vacancies (one Appellate Court vacancy, five countywide Circuit Court vacancies) have only one candidate. There are only two actual contests.

One other note: Every person living in Cook County lives in one of 20 Subcircuits. Depending on your subcircuit, you may have one vacancy to fill; you may have none. There are several uncontested subcircuit races as well. If you live in the 13th Subcircuit, you will find four vacancies... but only four candidates.

We begin with the one and only candidate for the Hoffman vacancy on the Illinois Appellate Court, namely, Judge Judith C. Rice. Here are her Alliance ratings:

The ratings issued by each of the bar associations that together comprise the Alliance of Bar Associations for Judicial Screening are found in the hieroglyphics beneath the abbrieviated names of the member bar groups. The Alliance provides a ratings key so that you may decipher the meanings of these hieroglyphics. Here it is:

We move next to the Alliance ratings for countywide candidates for vacancies on the Circuit Court of Cook County and their Alliance ratings (click to enlarge or clarify any image in this post):

For the record, my complaints about the minuscule number of candidates is not meant to infer or suggest anything negative about any of these persons individually. It strikes me, however, that the failure of more candidates to step forward and seek these vacancies may indicate that something is terribly wrong with our political process generally and, quite possibly, with our judicial system in particular. I am not the only person asking why this may be so (see this post for example).

The 13 members of the Alliance of Bar Associations for Judicial Screening are the Arab American Bar Association (AABAR), the Asian American Bar Association of the Greater Chicago Area (AABA), the Black Men Lawyers’ Association (BMLA), the Black Women Lawyers’ Association of Greater Chicago (BWLA), the Chicago Council of Lawyers (CCL), the Cook County Bar Association (CCBA), the Decalogue Society of Lawyers (DSL), the Hellenic Bar Association of Illinois (HBA), the Hispanic Lawyers Association of Illinois (HLAI), the Illinois State Bar Association (ISBA), Chicago’s LGBTQ+ Bar Association (LAGBAC), the Puerto Rican Bar Association (PRBA), and the Women’s Bar Association of Illinois (WBAI), all working collaboratively to improve the process of screening judicial candidates in Cook County, Illinois.