That’s the plight of retired Cook County Circuit Court Judge James R. Brown, who wrote an op-ed and appeared on a podcast after he resigned from the bench in 2020. When the state Supreme Court called retired judges to return to fill vacancies in 2025, Judge Brown returned to service at traffic court, only to be kicked out weeks later.
The offense was an opinion piece he wrote for John Kass’s website that criticized Biden administration policies and anti-Trump lawfare. He wrote that “prosecutors engaging in lawfare sent shockwaves not only through the legal community but also through our system of justice.” His bio noted that the judge, “now retired, worked for 30 years in the Cook County Criminal Justice System.”
That was too much for the progressives of the Illinois bar. The Cook County Bar Association and the Chicago Council of Lawyers asked the Illinois Supreme Court in a letter to reverse its decision calling Judge Brown back to the bench. “Under the First Amendment, any private citizen is, of course, generally free to express their opinions,” the lawyers wrote, but “members of the judiciary are held to a higher standard.”
Judge Brown pushed back with the help of the Liberty Justice Center and filed a lawsuit charging that the state court vacated Judge Brown’s appointment without “the process prescribed by the Constitution of the State of Illinois” and violated his First and Fourteenth Amendment rights. The suit says the complaint wasn’t referred to the Illinois Court’s Commission, and Judge Brown wasn’t given notice of a hearing before removal.