How do judges of the Supreme Court of Georgia reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Supreme Court of Georgia / Joined 1981 / Served to 1992

Charles L. Weltner

Justice, Supreme Court of Georgia

Charles L. Weltner was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Georgia, who joined the court in 1981. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1927–1992
Tenure: 1981–1992 · 11 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1981	Supreme Court of Georgia	–	–

Education

Oglethorpe University
Columbia University in the City of New York

Judicial Record

In our data, Weltner authored 520 published opinions for the court (1979–1992), plus 109 dissents and 52 concurrences. Most cited: State v. Thornton (372 citations).

Published, precedential opinions from the CourtListener corpus. Counts and rankings are objective and recomputable: how we count. We describe the record, not the judge. 331 of these were attributed to Weltner by a unique court-, date-, and surname-match against our roster (marked ), because CourtListener recorded no author for them. Each links to the official text to verify. How we match.

Selected opinions

Year	Case	Citation	Cited
1984	State v. Thornton	322 S.E.2d 711	372
1982	Gibbons v. State	286 S.E.2d 717	353
1984	State v. Stephens	311 S.E.2d 823	206
1986	Pope v. State· Dissent†	345 S.E.2d 831	182
1986	Yost v. Torok	344 S.E.2d 414	167
1984	Spivey v. State	319 S.E.2d 420	163
1984	Teague v. State	314 S.E.2d 910	162
1987	Childs v. State	357 S.E.2d 48	149
1987	Haggard v. Board of Regents of University System	360 S.E.2d 566	129
1986	Smith v. State	341 S.E.2d 5	125
1990	Atlanta Obstetrics & Gynecology Group, P. A. v. Coleman· Concurrence†	398 S.E.2d 16	119
1984	Head v. State	322 S.E.2d 228	117
1988	Colonial Pipeline Co. v. Brown· Concurrence†	365 S.E.2d 827	107
1984	General Telephone Co. of Southeast v. Trimm	311 S.E.2d 460	101
1983	McAuley v. Wills· Dissent†	303 S.E.2d 258	98

Showing the 15 most-cited of 682 authored opinions in our data. “Cited” is inbound citations across the CourtListener corpus. Case links open the ruling’s full text (CourtListener) or its page here; read the methodology and verify against the primary source.

Questions & answers

How do judges of the Supreme Court of Georgia reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Charles L. Weltner on?: Charles L. Weltner was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Georgia.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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11 years on the Supreme Court of Georgia. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).