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 1994 / Former Justice

Hugh P. Thompson

Justice, Supreme Court of Georgia

Hugh P. Thompson was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Georgia, who joined the court in 1994. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 1994 · 32 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1994	Supreme Court of Georgia	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Thompson authored 1,005 published opinions for the court (1994–2016), plus 39 dissents and 13 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. 363 of these were attributed to Thompson 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	686 S.E.2d 786	680
2010	Roberts v. State	690 S.E.2d 150	507
2010	Williams v. State	695 S.E.2d 244	192
2010	State v. Jackson· Dissent†	697 S.E.2d 757	177
1997	DeYoung v. State	493 S.E.2d 157	174
2015	Bradshaw v. State†	296 Ga. 650	172
2003	Home Builders Ass'n of Savannah, Inc. v. Chatham County	577 S.E.2d 564	159
2015	State v. Jones†	297 Ga. 156	158
2001	Jackson v. State	540 S.E.2d 612	149
2009	Miller v. State	676 S.E.2d 173	131
2001	Clark v. Wade· Dissent†	544 S.E.2d 99	131
2000	Gissendaner v. State	532 S.E.2d 677	131
1996	Merrow v. Hawkins	467 S.E.2d 336	127
2015	Smith v. State†	296 Ga. 731	122
2012	Clay v. State	725 S.E.2d 260	117

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,057 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 Hugh P. Thompson on?: Hugh P. Thompson 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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32 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).