Candidate Questionnaires from the Cook County Clerk of the Court Race

A note from the Chicago Council of Lawyers, our partner organization in the Collaboration for Justice: The Primary Election in Illinois is March 15th, and early voting is happening now. The Chicago Council of Lawyers wants voters to focus on electing the most qualified judges possible, but there ar...
March 7, 2016

Ruling in Sanchez v. Torres in the Illinois Appellate Court

In August, Chicago Appleseed joined an amicus authored by the Domestic Violence Legal Empowerment and Appeals Project of the George Washington University Law School and attorneys at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP filed before the Illinois Appellate court in Sanchez v. Torres. At issue in the case w...
February 2, 2016

Ensuring the Public Defense of Indigent Defendants in Cook County

The Criminal Justice Advisory Committee, a joint group of the Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice and the Chicago Council of Lawyers, has released a report on whether criminal defendants in Chicago’s felony preliminary hearing courtrooms receive the public defense required by the Sixth Amendment to t...
August 19, 2015

Child Support Enforcement and the Function of Family Courts

This week, the New York Times published a story about how the child support enforcement systems and policies in U.S. court create a cycle of non-payment by middle and low income parents: Skip Child Support. Go to Jail. Lose Job. Repeat. Unpaid child support became a big concern in the 1980s and ’90s...
April 22, 2015

Innovations in Family Courts

The Domestic Relations Division of the Cook County Court is carefully examining ways to make some significant changes which will improve the level of service for everyone needing to establish parentage of a child, get child support for a child or come to a shared agreement for parenting.  Chicago Ap...
June 11, 2014