In 9 Illinois counties, circuit judges are elected from a subcircuit rather than from the whole circuit. The subcircuit decides who may vote for a seat and who may run for it. It is not a court, it has no courthouse of its own, and most people who have one have never seen its boundary.
Or open the map and pick your location on it:
Find your judicial subcircuit →Opens the map with the subcircuit layer on. Search your address or ZIP, or tap your location.
What the lookup shows
Select any point in one of these counties and the card names the subcircuit containing it and the circuit court it elects judges to, with a link to that court. In Cook County it also names the municipal district and the courthouse that serves the point, which is a different division of the same court and the one that decides where a case is heard.
Outside these counties the layer hides rather than showing an empty card, which is what this site does everywhere a layer's data does not apply.
No judge is named here, and that is deliberate
An Illinois judge is elected from a subcircuit and then sits across the whole circuit. There is no judge assigned to a subcircuit, so a roster keyed by subcircuit would be a claim nobody publishes and nobody could check. Each card links the court itself instead. Your ballot is the place a subcircuit shows up: in a year with a vacancy, the judicial races you vote on are the ones for your subcircuit and nobody else's.
Where subcircuits exist
Read from this app's own dispatch table on the run that built this page, so a county joining or leaving changes the table below by regenerating it. Counties not listed elect their circuit judges circuit-wide. Kendall County is the case worth naming: its 23rd Circuit received no subcircuits when the legislature drew the current set, so its absence here is the statute rather than a gap in this site.
| County | Circuit | Subcircuits |
|---|---|---|
| Cook County | Circuit Court of Cook County | read from the county live |
| Will County | 12th Judicial Circuit (Will County) | read from the county live |
| DuPage County | 18th Judicial Circuit (DuPage County) | read from the county live |
| Lake County | 19th Judicial Circuit (Lake County) | read from the county live |
| Kane County | 16th Judicial Circuit (Kane County) | 4 |
| McHenry County | 22nd Judicial Circuit (McHenry County) | 4 |
| Winnebago County | 17th Judicial Circuit (Winnebago & Boone Counties) | 2 |
| Madison County | 3rd Judicial Circuit (Madison & Bond Counties) | 4 |
| Sangamon County | 7th Judicial Circuit (Sangamon, Greene, Jersey, Macoupin, Morgan & Scott Counties) | 7 |
5 of the 9 counties publish their subcircuits as a file this site ships, so those are counted on the run that built this page. The rest are fetched from the county's own service when you select a point, and nothing here can count them, so no number is printed rather than a number nobody measured.
Where the boundaries come from
Each county's own GIS where it publishes one, and the enacted redistricting shapefile where it does not — a county whose service is permission-locked, or which publishes no subcircuit layer at all, still has the same boundary, and the act that drew it is public. Which county uses which.