Don’t miss: Abdon Pallasch of the Chicago Sun-Times takes a look “inside the beast” at how the Cook County Democratic Party “slates” its judges. Women with Irish-sounding names do best with voters:

That’s why lawyers of Jewish or other ancestry often legally adopt Irish names to run for judge here. That’s why when party leaders slate men without Irish names, such as William Haddad, who would have been the first Arab-American full-circuit judge in Cook County, the party must recruit Irish women lawyers to run as “ringers” or “stalking horses” to flood the ballot and fracture the Irish-woman vote.

There’s a Corboy & Demetrio angle, too. And the National Law Journal covers the controversy over the Cook County Clerk’s decision to accept paid lawyer advertising on her office’s website (earlier).

Filed under: Chicago, judges