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 2005 / Former Justice

Harold D. Melton

Justice, Supreme Court of Georgia

Harold D. Melton was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Georgia, who joined the court in 2005. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 2005 · 21 yrs

Judicial service

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

Education

Emory University

Judicial Record

In our data, Melton authored 589 published opinions for the court (2005–2019), plus 73 dissents and 38 concurrences. Most cited: Harper v. State (680 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. 418 of these were attributed to Melton 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
2009	Harper v. State· Dissent†	686 S.E.2d 786	680
2012	Wright v. State†	291 Ga. 869	210
2016	Gates v. State†	298 Ga. 324	167
2010	Miller v. State	702 S.E.2d 888	116
2010	Lawrence v. State	690 S.E.2d 801	108
2012	Couch v. Red Roof Inns, Inc.†	291 Ga. 359	94
2008	Lupoe v. State	669 S.E.2d 133	86
2008	Mason v. Home Depot U.S.A., Inc.· Concurrence†	658 S.E.2d 603	81
2019	White v. State†	823 S.E.2d 794	79
2012	Sosniak v. State†	292 Ga. 35	77
2012	Hoover v. Maxum Indemnity Co.· Concurrence†	291 Ga. 402	75
2011	Hammond v. State	710 S.E.2d 124	72
2013	Brockman v. State†	292 Ga. 707	71
2011	Bryant v. State	708 S.E.2d 362	70
2014	Austin v. Clark†	294 Ga. 773	67

Showing the 15 most-cited of 700 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 Harold D. Melton on?: Harold D. Melton 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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21 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).