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 1966 / Served to 1980

Horace Elmo Nichols

Justice, Supreme Court of Georgia

Horace Elmo Nichols was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Georgia, who joined the court in 1966. He previously served on the Court of Appeals of Georgia. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1912–2000
Tenure: 1966–1980 · 14 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1954	Court of Appeals of Georgia	–	–
1966	Supreme Court of Georgia	–	–

Education

Samford University

Judicial Record

In our data, Nichols authored 1,828 published opinions for the court (1954–1981), plus 70 dissents and 25 concurrences. Most cited: Hill v. Willis (206 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. 822 of these were attributed to Nichols 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
1968	Hill v. Willis	161 S.E.2d 281	206
1980	Cambron v. Canal Insurance	269 S.E.2d 426	199
1974	Coley v. State· Dissent†	204 S.E.2d 612	150
1980	Hennessy v. Webb· Dissent†	264 S.E.2d 878	141
1979	Collier v. State	261 S.E.2d 364	136
1972	Creamer v. State	192 S.E.2d 350	114
1972	Robinson v. State	189 S.E.2d 53	114
1966	Dill v. State	152 S.E.2d 741	105
1976	State v. Moore	227 S.E.2d 241	99
1978	Howard v. Walker· Concurrence†	249 S.E.2d 45	96
1974	Cochran v. McCollum· Dissent†	210 S.E.2d 13	86
1969	Harrison v. Tuggle	167 S.E.2d 395	85
1974	State v. Luke	209 S.E.2d 165	84
1979	Boyd v. State	259 S.E.2d 71	83
1980	City of Columbus, Ga. v. Myszka· Dissent†	272 S.E.2d 302	81

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,923 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 Horace Elmo Nichols on?: Horace Elmo Nichols 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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14 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).