he became the Master in Chancery of the Circuit Court of Kane County. In 1956, he won a by-election held to fill a vacancy in the position of Circuit Judge for the 16th Judicial Division; he was re-elected in 1957. In July 1957, the Illinois Supreme Court appointed Solfisburg to the Appellate Court, Second District; he served as that court's Presiding Judge from 1959 to 1960. In 1960 he was elected by popular vote to The Illinois Supreme Court. In the wake of Abe Fortas's resignation, the media mentioned Solfisburg as a possible replacement for Fortas on the Supreme Court of the United States. Solfisburg, however, soon resigned in circumstances similar to those that forced Fortas to resign. (Senators Everett Dirksen and Charles H. Percy both encouraged President Richard Nixon to appoint Solfisburg to the Supreme Court.) The 1969 commissions history In 1969, Sherman Skolnick, head of the Citizens' Committee to Clean Up the Courts, examined the stockholder records and discovered that both Solfisburg and Justice Klingbiel owned stock in the CCB. This made him suspicious since in People v. Isaacs, the Supreme Court had upheld a dismissal of charges against Theodore J. Isaacs, the general counsel of the CCB and the records showed that the two justices acquired the stock shortly before their decision in Isaacs. Skolnick contacted several members of the media, and the story was broken in the Alton Evening-Telegraph before being picked up by all the major papers. After four expensive but inconclusive investigations The Illinois House of Representatives unanimously voted to appoint a special committee to investigate the matter, but before it could act, the Supreme Court, acting on its "inherent powers", granted a motion filed by Skolnick to appoint a special commission to investigate. (Ironically, the regular commission that investigated judicial malfeasance was chaired by Associate Justice Klingbiel, who was also accused of wrongdoing by Skolnick.) The commission was co-chaired by the president of the Chicago Bar Association and the president of the Illinois Bar Association. They named John Paul Stevens, a private practitioner with a thriving antitrust practice, as their independent counsel, thus setting the stage for Stevens' meteoric rise to the Supreme Court of the United States. In 1969, the Greenberg Commission, appointed by the Illinois Supreme Court to investigate Sherman Skolnick's corruption allegations leveled at former Chief Justice Ray Klingbiel and current Chief Justice Roy J. Solfisburg, Jr., named Stevens as