William J. Bauer was a DuPage County state’s attorney and federal prosecutor before serving on the federal bench in Chicago, and he developed a reputation for being a moderate, pragmatic voice on the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Although Bauer’s tenure as the Chicago-based U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois was brief — he was the city’s top federal prosecutor from 1970 until 1971 — colleagues recalled how Bauer transformed the U.S. attorney’s office in the city, working to minimize the impact of politics on hiring and prosecutions made by that office.
Later, as a federal judge, Bauer continued to build his reputation for integrity and fairness, colleagues said.
“He had every great job in the law worth having,” said Joel Bertocchi, a litigation partner at the Akerman law firm who was a staff attorney at the 7th Circuit from 1985 until 1987. “He had an unparalleled resume and excelled at every one of his jobs. It’s impossible to exaggerate his accomplishments in the Chicago legal community.”
Bauer, 99, died of natural causes Monday at Caledonia Senior Living’s Scottish Home assisted living facility in North Riverside, said his wife of 14 years, Cook County Circuit Judge Patricia Spratt. Bauer previously had been a Forest Park resident and a longtime resident of Elmhurst.
Born in Chicago in 1926, Bauer was the son of an oil salesman and grew up in the South Side Grand Crossing neighborhood and attended St. Rita High School for his first year. He moved in late 1941 with his family to Elmhurst, and attended Immaculate Conception High School, where he played football. After graduating from Immaculate Conception in 1944. Bauer attended St. Mary’s College in Minnesota and then Elmhurst College.
During college, Bauer drove a taxi to help make ends meet. Earlier, he had worked side-by-side with his best friend, future U.S. Rep. John Erlenborn, at the Ovaltine factory in Villa Park.
“We weren’t on the verge of poverty,” Bauer told the Tribune in 1988. “But the prevailing philosophy at that time was that everybody was supposed to hustle.”
After serving in the Army from 1945 until 1947, Bauer returned to Elmhurst College and received a bachelor’s degree with honors in 1949. He got a law degree from DePaul University’s College of Law in 1952.
Bauer told the Tribune in 1993 that he had wanted to be a lawyer since he was about 13.
“My mother says I must have gone to a movie and seen somebody wearing a suit and persuading somebody and thought that was a great occupation,” he said. “Remember now, I grew up in the Depression on the South Side of Chicago in a non-affluent neighborhood. I didn’t even know a lawyer. I knew a lot of railroad people, and cops and things like that. So she’s probably right.”
Exhibit honors ‘Sage of DuPage’
Bauer was an assistant state’s attorney in DuPage County from 1952 until 1958. Then in an upset, he was elected state’s attorney in DuPage County in a special election in April 1959, defeating a County Board-appointed incumbent in the GOP primary, Jack Bowers. He then beat future federal Judge Prentice Marshall, a Democrat, in the general election.
As DuPage state’s attorney, Bauer earned a reputation as a tough prosecutor who was as comfortable in the courtroom as he was chatting with cops. One unpopular campaign was his countywide assault on mob-controlled pinball gambling, which led to the county eventually outlawing such machines.
In 1964, Bauer was named a DuPage circuit judge.
“I enjoy politics,” Bauer told the Tribune’s David Young in 1971. “Anyone who tells you they don’t use politics to get to the bench is lying to you.”
While a DuPage judge, Bauer had been gearing up to run for the Illinois Supreme Court when his career took a pivot. In 1970, he was nominated by President Richard Nixon to be U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois. He was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in July 1970, and immediately set about changing the tenor of Chicago’s U.S. attorney’s office.
“Prior to Bill, it had been a political office,” said former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District Anton Valukas, whom Bauer hired as an assistant U.S. attorney in 1970. “He changed that in a way that was transformational not only for this office but it was carried on across the country, which set a standard. He didn’t care about his assistant U.S. attorneys’ politics, and it became the norm that if someone mentioned politics in an interview to be an assistant U.S. attorney, that person was no longer going to be considered.”
While U.S. attorney, Bauer ordered several investigations into vote fraud. He also oversaw several assistant U.S. attorneys who went on to distinguished law careers, including Valukas, Illinois Attorney General Tyrone Fahner and U.S. Attorney for the Northern District Dan Webb. He also hired James R. Thompson, who went on to become U.S. attorney and then governor, as his first assistant.
“He was the North Star for those who came through,” Valukas said. “The Chicago federal prosecutor’s office was no longer a backwater by the time he was done. And he made clear that everything that his staff did in the office reflected on him. That meant that what was important was: Was this the right thing to do, and was this upholding the high standards of the office.”
Bauer’s time as U.S. attorney was short-lived, as he was nominated and confirmed to be a federal judge in the Northern District in October 1971, succeeding fellow DuPage resident Judge Joseph Sam Perry. His legacy as U.S. attorney lived on long after he ascended to the federal bench, with his staff obtaining convictions of some of Chicago’s top politicians.
Bauer had no regrets about leaving the U.S. attorney’s office, as Illinois’ U.S. senators had pledged to give him a shot at a federal judgeship even before he became U.S. attorney.
“I can’t think of anything I’d rather do than become a federal judge,” he told the Tribune in 1971. “The federal bench has become more and more important in our society in the last few years as we move toward a more federal system.”
Although Bauer was a skilled speaker and a savvy politician, the type of frank comments he made to the Tribune upon his confirmation to the federal bench in 1971 would be unheard of today for a federal judicial appointee. Among other things, Bauer forthrightly told the Tribune that he favored the death penalty.
“I have never been very impressed with political labels,” he told the Tribune in 1971. “Strict constructionism has an importance on the Supreme Court, where the Constitution is interpreted. The duty of a trial judge is to enforce the law as it is. Essentially, the trial courts apply the law to a specific situation.”
While a federal judge, Bauer presided over a trial for more than 20 Chicago police officers, which concluded that officers had shaken down dozens of tavern owners for bribes.
“A good trial judge goes out of his way to make life easier for the lawyers,” Bauer told the Tribune in 1988. “You can laugh at yourself, (but) you can’t laugh at any of the parties, or the jury, nor should you.”
In 1974, President Gerald Ford appointed Bauer to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, which hears cases from federal district courts in Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin.
A noted — and humorous — opinion he authored in 1979 came when he ordered the government to return $275,000 in cash that had been seized from the River Forest home of reputed Chicago Outfit boss Anthony Accardo. The legal dispute arose after Accardo’s home was burglarized, but Accardo did not report the burglary to police. Soon afterward, some noted area burglars began turning up dead.
Bauer wrote that the record did not disclose whether Accardo’s failure to report the break-in “was based on a lack of faith in the powers of the police to solve the crime or a basic mistrust of dealing with law enforcement agencies that has roots in some earlier, and also unexplained, experience of Accardo. At any rate, some time after the burglary … various people described by the government as ‘known burglars’ began to show up dead, none from natural causes. … The sudden increase of homicides within a particular and, one might hope, limited professional group apparently fanned the normally suspicious attitudes of the various law enforcement agencies to a fever pitch.”
And in a 1984 opinion resolving a tax dispute between the Internal Revenue Service and Milwaukee Brewers owner Bud Selig, Bauer invoked baseball lore and lines from the famed poem “Casey at the Bat.”
Bauer told the Tribune in 1988 that being an appeals court judge “is not as close to the throbbing heart of the law as a trial judge is. But this is a chance to make a greater impact on the field of law.”
Bauer was elevated to chief judge of the 7th Circuit in 1986. He overcame cancer of the larynx, which was diagnosed in July 1987 and required two months of radiation treatments.
Upon stepping down as the 7th Circuit’s chief judge after the maximum seven-year term in 1993, Bauer told the Tribune that while “divorced from the political hurly-burly,” he still viewed himself as “a political animal” of sorts.
“Politics in its proper sense is the deep interest in good government and how it functions,” he said. “Anybody in government is almost by definition in politics.”
Bauer assumed senior status, or a form of semi-retirement, in 1994. He continued hearing cases on a reduced basis until becoming an inactive federal judge in 2022.
In late 2010, the DuPage County Judicial Office Facility Annex in Wheaton was renamed the William J. Bauer Judicial office Facility Annex at the request of then-DuPage County Board Chairman Robert Schillerstrom. The following year, Schillerstrom, along with retired DuPage County Circuit Judge Edward Duncan, retired state Supreme Court Justice S. Louis Rathje, former DuPage Water Commission Chairman Joel Herter and Mark Wight, chairman and CEO of Downers Grove architectural firm Wight & Company, raised about $50,000 to pay for a statue of Bauer, which stands outside the building. In 2015, an exhibit opened at the annex covering Bauer’s life and career.
In 2012, College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn named the mock courtroom in the school’s Homeland Security Education Center after him.
For many years, Bauer delivered lectures on advanced criminal trial procedure at DePaul University’s College of Law.
Outside of work, Bauer enjoyed reading, said Spratt, his wife.
“He was a reader all day long — he could not get enough to read, whether fiction, nonfiction or history,” she said.
Bauer’s first wife of 56 years, Mary “Mike” Bauer, died in 2006. In addition to his second wife, Bauer is survived by two daughters, Pat Bauer and Lin Bauer; a granddaughter; and two great-grandchildren.
A service is planned for early 2026.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
