County Bar Associations Use Lawfare to Protest Lawfare Protest
7th June 2026
It’s amazing what can happen when attorneys get desperate enough. In the case of Cook County Circuit Judge James R. Brown, they got pretty desperate.
The controversy erupted when Judge Brown wrote a caustic piece, after he had retired from his position, protesting the kinds of misbehaviors he saw in government when he wrote a column for John Kass in Chicago:
Please note that he was a retired judge when he wrote this column. After he had been retired for five years, the Illinois Supreme Court called on him to serve a temporary assignment in Cook County’s traffic courts due to an overload of cases.
Of course, the Democrats were enraged. When the Cook County Bar Association and the Chicago Council of Lawyers demanded that the Illinois Supreme Court rescind Brown’s appointment, they did. They claimed that he had “clearly violated” the code of conduct (even though he had written the column earlier during his retirement).
Judge Brown was not going to take his removal lying down, and filed suit in federal court, seeking a court order to reverse the state high court’s decision to abruptly toss him from the bench: