Daniel Epstein (Illinois)

Daniel Epstein (Democratic Party) ran for election for the 1st District judge of the Illinois Supreme Court. He lost in the Democratic primary on March 17, 2020.

Epstein completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2020. Click here to read the survey answers.

Biography

Daniel Epstein earned a bachelor's degree from Washington University, St. Louis, in 2007 and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School in 2015. His career experience includes working as an attorney with Chicago-based law firm Jenner & Block and being the co-founder of the online services company ZEYO.^[1]

Elections

2020

General election

General election for Illinois Supreme Court 1st District

Incumbent P. Scott Neville defeated Richard Mayers in the general election for Illinois Supreme Court 1st District on November 3, 2020.

		Candidate	%	Votes
✔		P. Scott Neville (D)	100.0	1,765,329
	Submit photo	Richard Mayers (Independent) (Write-in)	0.0	31

	Incumbents are bolded and underlined. The results have been certified. Source	Total votes: 1,765,360
= candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey.
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Democratic primary election

Democratic primary for Illinois Supreme Court 1st District

The following candidates ran in the Democratic primary for Illinois Supreme Court 1st District on March 17, 2020.

	Candidate	%	Votes
✔	P. Scott Neville	26.2	214,066
	Jesse G. Reyes	20.3	165,344
	Sheldon Harris	15.1	123,166
	Cynthia Cobbs	12.7	103,497
	Margaret Stanton McBride	12.4	101,475
	Daniel Epstein	8.2	66,762
	Nathaniel R. Howse	5.1	41,205
	Other/Write-in votes	0.0	22

	Incumbents are bolded and underlined. The results have been certified. Source	Total votes: 815,537
= candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey.
If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey.
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Withdrawn or disqualified candidates

Clint Krislov (D)

Campaign themes

2020

Video for Ballotpedia

Video submitted to Ballotpedia Released June 24, 2019

Ballotpedia survey responses

Daniel Epstein completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2020. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by Epstein's responses. Candidates are asked three required questions for this survey, but they may answer additional optional questions as well.

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Who are you? Tell us about yourself.

I am an attorney who served clients in cases in the Supreme Court of the United States and courts across the country. I worked for the #1 law firm for pro bono service in the country, Jenner & Block, and won their Pro Bono Award for exceptional legal service to the needy. I chaired the Chicago Bar Association committee on Alternative Dispute Resolution, co-authored the Illinois Civil Practice Guide that professors use to teach civil practice, and built an online court of arbitration.

I have worked for progressive causes for the last 15 years. I fought white supremacists while working in the British House of Commons, testified in DC in support of marriage equality, and worked across the country to expand access to early childhood education. I founded a nonprofit providing citizen-owned security cameras and solar panels to families in Chicago's Austin neighborhood, and serve on the board of the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs and Lawndale Christian Legal Center's Young Professionals Council.

I represented Illinoisans who were hurt by the state's justice system and my campaign proposes reforms to court rules that other states have already adopted, and that would prevent wrongful convictions and judicial corruption.

Please list below 3 key messages of your campaign. What are the main points you want voters to remember about your goals for your time in office?

End cash bail.
Stop compensating courts for convictions.
Create an independent body to determine judicial conflicts of interest and recusals, so that we no longer rely on the honor system to stop judges from deciding cases for campaign donors.

What areas of public policy are you personally passionate about?

I am passionate about eliminating institutional bias within our justice system. I believe that the purpose of our justice system is to find truth and restore. Institutional biases are rules that hinder our courts' ability to accomplish those ends, and unfortunately there are many such rules in Illinois.

Our courts are entitled to extra funds if they convict, granting financial rewards for finding guilt rather than truth.

They jail for years people who have been deemed safe to return to the community not because they have been found guilty, but because they do not have the cash to afford their bail.

They allow quacks to qualify as "expert witnesses" and submit pseudoscientific testimony that has been used to wrongfully convict people.

They lack tools to defend against racist and sexist jury exclusion and biased sentencing.

They fail to provide the type of discovery in criminal cases that would help expose decades-long serial police misconduct and faulty forensics.

They rely on the honor system to stop judges from deciding cases for campaign donors.

We can eliminate these manifestations of institutional bias. We can help our courts find truth and restore. That is my life's work. That is my passion.

Who do you look up to? Whose example would you like to follow, and why?

Operation Greylord represents one of the most important improvements in the history of Illinois' justice system, and the hero at the center of it didn't have 30, or 20, or even 10 years of experience. Greylord was spurred by a young attorney named Terry Hake. He was not the only one who knew about the corruption in our courts. He was surrounded by people with decades of experience with that corruption, but over those years they had grown used to it. Terry Hake hadn't grown used to it and he was the idealist who stepped up and fought to fix it. We need that again.

What do you believe are the core responsibilities for someone elected to this office?

The Illinois Supreme Court has two buckets of authority: adjudicative and non-adjudicative. Adjudicative authority is the kind that most are familiar with, where justices apply facts and evidence to law, interpret law, and decide cases. Non-adjudicative authority, though oft-ignored, is no less important. It includes the Court's power to write rules of procedure, evidence, and ethics; to set design standards of courthouses; to determine procurement policy; to control the data and technological infrastructure of our courts; to determine attorney admission and discipline, and on and on. In other words, it includes the Court's policy making powers.

Those policy making powers are critical, because they can be used to prevent recurring injustices. Illinois Supreme Court justices have the power to prevent judicial corruption by reforming recusal policy, to prevent wrongful convictions based on junk forensic science by reforming our expert admission standard, and to prevent serial police misconduct by reforming the rules of criminal discovery. They have that power, and in many instances it is exclusive. The legislature cannot make many of these necessary reforms-they have tried and were rebuffed for breaching separation of powers. Only the seven justices have the power to reform voir dire to prevent racist jury selection, or sentencing policy to require judges to explain on the record the reasoning behind their sentences (which would allow defendants to effectively appeal erroneous sentences).

Illinois Supreme Court justices have the power to reform our justice system. And that means that this race is not about the candidates at all. It is about the customers of the court-the people, parties, and communities that courts are meant to serve. It means that we have to consider vision-a vision for how we can reform our courts to better serve its customers. And that is what my candidacy is about.

Are there any little-known powers or responsibilities held by this office that you believe more people should be aware of?

Yes, the Illinois Supreme Court has rulemaking authority--the power to write rules of procedure, evidence, and ethics. Those rules are incredibly important and, unlike in some other jurisdictions, the power belongs almost exclusively to the Court (as opposed to the legislature).

One of the most interesting illustrations of this is in a 1982 case called People v. Davis. Prior to the case, the Illinois legislature passed a law requiring judges to explain on the record how they arrive at the sentences they issue (that is important, because judges sometimes make errors in sentencing and if they do not explain their reasoning on the record, it becomes effectively impossible to fix via appeal). Not long after that law passed, some judges did not explain the reasoning behind their sentences and defendants petitioned for remand, arguing that the judges' failure to provide statements of reasons violated that statute. The Illinois Supreme Court concluded that "the pronouncement of sentence is at the heart of the judicial function," and so the legislature's statute cannot be interpreted to require judges to explain their sentences on the record. In other words, the Illinois Supreme Court said, "you cannot fix this, only we can fix this." And then they did not fix it. So it is still this way.

With respect to this and many other court policies, the Illinois Supreme Court is the only entity with the authority to make reforms. I am proud that our platform calls for those reforms.

Do you believe that Bar Association ratings are an accurate reflection of a judge’s ability?

No, I have not seen any evidence to support the notion that bar association ratings reliably predict judicial candidate quality. Moreover, certain practices by bar associations likely add error to their ratings. For example, most rating bar associations in Illinois follow a strict rule under which they automatically declare an applicant "not qualified" if they have fewer than 10 years of experience. In other words, you could have two people who are identical in every way, with the exact same experience, but one accomplished the feat in nine years whereas the other did it in 11 years. The one who did it faster will be declared not qualified while the one who did it slower may be declared qualified. That is not justifiable and it deters younger jurists from seeking the bench, thereby reducing diversity of age in our judiciary.

There are exceptionally talented and experienced people who would make great judges, but who chose a different career trajectory because they knew they would be shamed as "not qualified" even though they were. And by the time they passed the 10 year mark, they were partners at major firms and a job change no longer made sense for them. So not only does the bar association's rule reduce age diversity, it pushes away talent.

As someone who is impacted by this rule, I have tried to address it by (1) running in spite of it, so that others might find courage through my action, and (2) submitting to the bar associations' ratings process so that-rather than being able to declare me "not qualified" by virtue of not participating in the process-they have to apply the bad rule, and in applying that bad rule hopefully become motivated to eliminate it for future cycles.

If you are not a sitting judge, do you have any previous judicial experience? Do you believe it’s important to have that kind of experience for this judgeship?

More than one-third of all justices of the US Supreme Court and Illinois Supreme Court never served as judges prior to joining their respective high courts. That includes great justices like Earl Warren (US), Louis Brandeis (US), and Walter Schaefer (IL); and current justices Elena Kagan (US) and Thomas Kilbride (IL). So, historically speaking, it appears that previous judicial experience has not been an impediment to exceptional performance. That suggests that if we want to predict exceptional performance as a justice, we are more likely to find it in someone with exceptional performance as an attorney than we are in someone with mediocre performance as a judge.

Note: Ballotpedia reserves the right to edit Candidate Connection survey responses. Any edits made by Ballotpedia will be clearly marked with [brackets] for the public. If the candidate disagrees with an edit, he or she may request the full removal of the survey response from Ballotpedia.org. Ballotpedia does not edit or correct typographical errors unless the candidate's campaign requests it.

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Footnotes

↑ Information submitted to Ballotpedia through the Candidate Connection survey on February 22, 2020

[bio-1] Information submitted to Ballotpedia through the Candidate Connection survey on February 22, 2020

[1]

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Daniel Epstein (Illinois)

Contents

Biography

Elections

2020

General election

General election for Illinois Supreme Court 1st District

Democratic primary election

Democratic primary for Illinois Supreme Court 1st District

Withdrawn or disqualified candidates

Campaign themes

2020

Video for Ballotpedia

Ballotpedia survey responses

See also

External links

Footnotes

Information about voting

2025 Elections

2026 Elections

2024 Election analysis

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Public Policy

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