In 1949, President Harry Truman short-listed him as a possible nominee for the United States Supreme Court.

[1][2] While he was attending university, his brother Chester enrolled alongside him and helped study by reading the materials to him.

[1] For six years, Farthing served as master in chancery for the city court of East St.

[1] In 1933, he won election to the first district seat on the Illinois Supreme Court, defeating Charles H. Miller.

In 1939, Farthing authored a dissenting opinion in Swing et al. v. American Federation of Labor.

The majority opinion upheld a lower court ruling that allowed a union members to be denied the right to picket a workplace they were not employed at regardless of whether the protest was peaceful.

When the United States Supreme Court reversed this decision in American Federation of Labor v. Swing, the majority opinion by Felix Frankfurter and the concurrences authored by Hugo Black and William O. Douglas agreed with the argument that had been made in Farthing's dissent.

Efforts were made during this process to have the rules address procedural concerns that had gone largely unaddressed in the decades since the state had ratified its 1870 constitution.

[1] Farthing lost re-election in 1942, when Illinois saw a wave election favoring Republican judicial candidates.

[3] In 1949, Farthing was one of six short-listed candidates that President Harry S. Truman considered to replace Wiley Rutledge on the U.S. Supreme Court.

[1] Over the course of 27 years, Farthing and his brother Chester assembled a complete collection of all 260 volumes of imprints of Illinois laws, dating back to its territorial era.