About Elizabeth Monkus

Elizabeth Monkus (she/her) is the Senior Attorney & Project Director for Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts. Elizabeth came to Chicago Appleseed in 2010 to manage the Judicial Performance Commission Demonstration project. She currently focuses on domestic relations and judicial elections in her program work.

The Job of Court Reform

Judge Sheryl Pethers has created a stir with her retirement announcement, which highlights aspects of her judicial service that left her concerned about the administration of the civil courts in Cook County. Chicago Appleseed has a long history of working with the courts, to improve deficiencies id...
August 4, 2016

ACS Report on Judicial Diversity

The American Constitution Society recently released a report, The Gavel Gap, on the demographics of state court judges, highlighting the discrepancies among the demographics of our communities, law school graduates, and judges on the bench. Overall, the report finds that courts are not representativ...
July 21, 2016

Field Testing in Drug Arrests

Earlier this month, both The New York Times and The Marshall Project ran excellent stories on how a roadside field tests for drugs can return false positives that send innocent people to jail or even cause them to plead guilty when they did not possess drugs. The articles highlighted alarming uses o...
July 13, 2016

Law Schools and the Duty of Pro Bono Service

Recently, the Wall Street Journal ran a short piece commenting on The Imposition of Social Justice Morality in Legal Education by Julie D. Lawton in Volume 4, Issue 1 of the 2016 Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equity. Ms. Lawton is an associate Clinical Professor of Law and the Director of the Ho...
May 31, 2016

Report on the Impact of Court Fines, Fees and Costs

The Collaboration for Justice—the joint social justice effort of Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice and the Chicago Council of Lawyers—has released a report on the impact and legality of court fines, fees and costs. The report details how the recent trend of shifting court costs to low-income and in...
May 26, 2016
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