At a hearing that lasted barely 10 minutes, a federal judge released Cook County Clerk Karen Yarbrough from court oversight of hiring and promotions in her office, ending a 54-year-old lawsuit that led to a sea change in Illinois politics and largely ended patronage hiring.
The order was lifted by U.S. District Judge Edmond Chang, the sixth judge to preside over the lawsuit filed in 1969 by Michael Shakman, a Democrat who claimed the army of patronage workers holding government jobs thwarted his bid to become a delegate to the party convention.
The judge acknowledged that Yarbrough’s office had not been a poster child for reformed hiring practices, but he noted that an appeals court ruling last summer lowered the bar for proving politics had been eliminated from a government agency’s personnel practices.
By those new standards, Yarbrough’s office was due to be released from the mandates of the so-called Shakman Decree.
“This does end the (Shakman) case,” the 52-year-old judge said. “It should be exceedingly rare that a case is older than the presiding judge.
In an era of increasing political polarization, Chang noted that “the last thing we need is more politics in public employment. This case has served its purpose and it is closed. The Northern District (federal court) remains open as it is needed.”
Shakman was not present in the courtroom for the final hearing in a case that carried his name across seven decades. His attorney, Brian Hays, said the clerk’s office has adopted equitable hiring policies, trained staff on them and gone without violations since the court appointed a monitor to police hiring at the clerk’s office in 2020.
“The clerk has ticked off the boxes of what we asked her to do,” Hays said. “As the 7th Circuit (federal appeals court) held, perfection is not the standard.”
Yarbrough sat silent beside attorneys for her office during the hearing, and left the Dirksen Federal Courthouse without speaking to reporters. In a statement issued after the hearing, she said her office had spent $3 million on compliance, including fees paid to lawyers for both sides and the compliance monitor, since 2020.
“We are pleased that the court has recognized our commitment to fair and equitable hiring and employment policies,” Yarbrough said in the statement. “The termination of this consent decree is going to save taxpayers millions of dollars in legal fees and enable us to focus fully on ensuring effective hiring standards, building continued efficiencies across our office, and providing the best possible service to the residents of Cook County.”
