Starting to look at the Short List finalists

Friday's post about the announcement of the 14-person associate judge Short List cribbed rather extensively from the OCJ's press release.

But I omitted one detail, because I wanted to call particular attention to it: The press release noted that the new Nominating Committee interviewed 74 hopefuls. A total of 100 had applied for this class, but 26 withdrew before the interview stage.

That's a really small number of applicants. This is consistent with the small number of candidates who came forward for the recent primary (not even one Republican filed for any vacancy; four of the six countywide vacancies, including the only Appellate Court vacancy, were uncontested in the Democratic primary, as were 13 of the 23 subcircuit vacancies).

Although 100 is a very small number of applicants, there were only 81 who applied for the extremely small class of associate judges announced in 2024. By comparison, there were

• 212 applicants in March 2022,
• 246 in February 2021,
• 212 in September 2018,
• 272 in February 2017,
• "Over 270" applicants for the short list announced in March 2014,
• 239 applicants for the short list announced in March 2012, and
• 278 applicants for the short list announced in August 2009.

Is a judicial career becoming unattractive? I don't really think that is likely, but these numbers require at least considering the question. (And -- as long as we're asking questions -- if interest in judicial service really has waned among our brother and sister attorneys, why?)

In the next couple of days, I will put up individual profiles of each of the Short List hopefuls, but, before we get to that, it may be interesting to look at the group as a whole.

This 14-person group includes two persons who are already serving as judges. Ginger Odom was appointed to a 1st Subcircuit vacancy last year; Linda Sackey was appointed to a countywide vacancy in late 2024, but was passed over at slating time by the Cook County Democratic Party. Neither prevailed in their respective primary contests.

There are a group of know-it-alls (all named Anonymous) who assert that appointed judges who fall short at the polls are assured of 'rescue' in the associate judge selection process -- the politicians protect their own, and so forth.

Rubbish.

But Odom and Sackey do have one potential advantage over their fellow Short Listees: They have been 'on the job' for a while. They have had an opportunity to impress their fellow jurists with how they have conducted themselves 'in harness.' As former DePaul University Law School Dean Warren Wolfson, a former circuit and appellate judge, once stated, "Unless someone's been sitting as a judge, you don’t really know how they’re going to behave." Of course, if the Circuit Court of Cook County is no longer the largest county court, it is among the largest: Most of the judges who will vote for associate judge will not have firsthand knowledge of either candidate's conduct in office.

For years the belief was that making the Short List was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Persons who made the Short List, but who were not selected, seldom made it back to another Short List. Some recent Short Lists seemed to buck that trend (the 2023 list had a very large number of persons who'd made one or more prior Short Lists -- including one who'd last made it in 2012), but the current list seems to return to form: Of this year's hopefuls, only Anthony Ruffin was a prior Short List finalist -- and he was a finalist in 2023.

But while there are a lot of newcomers to the Short List, not everyone on this list is entirely unfamiliar to FWIW readers. In addition to Odom, Sackey, and Ruffin, Juanishá N. Dotson and Gregory Mitchell were alternates selected by the Cook County Democratic Party in 2025 for countywide vacancies that did not open (3rd and 6th alternates respectively). Another finalist, Nikolas G. Pappas, was a candidate for a 20th Subcircuit vacancy in 2024.