Who I Am: A Note From Judge Monique O’Toole

Thirty years in DuPage County courtrooms, and what they taught me about service

I grew up in Hinsdale. My first exposure to the justice system came as a college student at the University of Colorado, volunteering with the probation department at the Boulder County Justice Center. During summer breaks I came home and worked at the DuPage County State’s Attorney’s Office as a victim advocate at the old courthouse on Reber Street. I saw early what a courtroom looks like from the perspective of someone having the worst week of their life. I have tried never to forget it.

After law school in Chicago, I returned to the DuPage County State’s Attorney’s Office — first as a law clerk, then as an Assistant State’s Attorney, prosecuting traffic, misdemeanor, domestic violence, and juvenile cases. Those courtrooms are where most people actually meet the justice system. Not in the dramatic trials that make television, but in the crowded call of a Tuesday morning, where every case file is somebody’s bad day, and how you are treated matters as much as the outcome.

I later served as an Assistant Attorney General for the State of Illinois, first in the Civil Appeals Bureau, representing state agencies before the Illinois Appellate Courts. While there, I earned my LL.M. in Health Law from Loyola University Chicago, and I became one of the first Assistant Attorneys General in the newly created Health Care Consumer Fraud Bureau, protecting consumers from unfair and deceptive insurance practices. After a decade in private practice, I returned to the State’s Attorney’s Office, this time in the Child Support Enforcement Unit — work that is rarely glamorous and always necessary.

On October 7, 2019, I was appointed a Circuit Judge of the Eighteenth Judicial Circuit, and in November 2020 the voters of DuPage County elected me to the bench. I am told I am the first Arab-American judge in the county’s history. I carry that with pride, and with the awareness that being first only matters if you leave the door open wider than you found it.

Outside the courthouse I am a reader (my book club is in its eighteenth year), a runner, a tennis player, and a reliable soft touch for any dog within a hundred yards — which explains my volunteering with the Hinsdale Humane Society. My family has been beside me for all of it.

Why write any of this down? Because I believe judges should be knowable. Not in their rulings — those speak through the law — but as members of the community they serve. The people who come through our courtrooms deserve to know that the person on the bench has spent a career in their county, learning its cases one bad Tuesday at a time.

Thank you for reading. I’ll use this space now and then to write about the courts, civic life, and the community I’m proud to serve.

— Monique N. O’Toole, Circuit Judge, Eighteenth Judicial Circuit of Illinois