A Lasting Legacy - Chief Justice Mary Jane Theis

Long before she wore the robe, Theis was a 3L answering a call for help. In the early 1970s, when the Bay Area legal community was reeling from the San Quentin Six and Marin County Massacre cases, the Marin County Public Defender's Office asked USF for accomplished students to help ease the load. Theis stepped up. "So I was practicing law from the time I was a 3L," she recalled in a 2023 interview. "And what I remember from that time was that when the local legal community was suffering, USF stood up." That instinct, to serve where the need is greatest, never left her. It showed up in her years as an assistant public defender in Cook County, where she came to "appreciate the intimacy of the law." It showed up as she rose through Illinois' courts: associate judge, circuit court judge, appellate justice, and finally the state's top jurist. And it echoed values her father, a Cook County judge himself, had modeled for her from the bench years before.

Image

In her retirement letter, written to her Supreme Court colleagues, Theis traces four decades of work to restore the public's faith in Illinois courts: a strengthened Courts Commission, a modern Code of Judicial Conduct, the creation of the Access to Justice Commission, cameras in courtrooms, and a judiciary that met the pandemic by rethinking, rather than retreating from, its obligations to the public. Her closing conviction sums up the philosophy that guided her the whole way through: "Courts are not a place, they are a service."

Colleagues describe a jurist as rigorous as she was fair. "Chief Justice Theis is always well-prepared, insightful, deliberate," retired Justice Rita Garman, a friend of 40 years, said in a 2023 interview. "If I ever read an opinion of hers that I didn't agree with, I would go back and reread the entire case to see if there was something I missed."

Family, too, remained central throughout. She cherishes time with children, grandchildren, and her husband of more than 50 years, fellow USF Law alumnus John Theis '73. More than four decades after she first put on the robe, Chief Justice Theis leaves behind a judiciary that is more transparent, more accountable, and more attuned to the people it serves. It is, in the end, exactly what she set out to build: a court that earns the public's trust, one case at a time.