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

The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.

Court of Appeals of Georgia / Joined 2005 / Served to 2010

Debra Bernes

Judge, Court of Appeals of Georgia

Debra Bernes was a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Georgia, who joined the court in 2005. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 2005–2010 · 5 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2005	Court of Appeals of Georgia	–	–

Education

University of Florida
University of Florida

Judicial Record

In our data, Bernes authored 738 published opinions for the court (2005–2010), plus 7 dissents and 16 concurrences. Most cited: Jim Ellis Atlanta, Inc. v. Adamson (166 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. 146 of these were attributed to Bernes 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
2006	Jim Ellis Atlanta, Inc. v. Adamson	640 S.E.2d 688	166
2008	DaimlerChrysler Motors Co., LLC v. Clemente	668 S.E.2d 737	64
2005	Nelson v. State	625 S.E.2d 465	55
2007	Kaiser v. State· Concurrence†	646 S.E.2d 84	54
2007	J. Kinson Cook of Georgia, Inc. v. Heery/Mitchell	644 S.E.2d 440	47
2005	In the Interest of L. G.†	273 Ga. App. 468	46
2010	Towry v. State	695 S.E.2d 683	44
2010	Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. v. McDavid	693 S.E.2d 873	44
2005	Walker v. Giles	624 S.E.2d 191	43
2009	Steed v. Federal National Mortgage Corp.	689 S.E.2d 843	42
2009	Goolsby v. State	682 S.E.2d 671	41
2007	In the Interest of R. N. H.†	286 Ga. App. 737	38
2006	Milk v. Total Pay and HR Solutions, Inc.	634 S.E.2d 208	38
2010	Craig v. BAILEY BROS. REALTY, INC.	697 S.E.2d 888	37
2009	Sommese v. State	683 S.E.2d 642	37

Showing the 15 most-cited of 761 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 Court of Appeals of Georgia reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is nonpartisan election.
Which court was Debra Bernes on?: Debra Bernes was a Judge of the Court of Appeals 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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5 years on the Court of Appeals of Georgia. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).