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 1960 / Served to 1979

John Sammons Bell

Judge, Court of Appeals of Georgia

John Sammons Bell was a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Georgia, who joined the court in 1960. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1914–2006
Tenure: 1960–1979 · 19 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1960	Court of Appeals of Georgia	–	–

Education

Mercer University
Emory University

Judicial Record

In our data, Bell authored 1,508 published opinions for the court (1960–1979), plus 26 dissents and 19 concurrences. Most cited: Harper v. DeFreitas (141 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. 642 of these were attributed to Bell 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	Harper v. DeFreitas	160 S.E.2d 260	141
1961	Scales v. Peevy	118 S.E.2d 193	125
1966	Hoard v. Wiley	147 S.E.2d 782	120
1966	Georgia Power Co. v. Maddox	149 S.E.2d 393	78
1967	Palmer v. Stevens†	115 Ga. App. 398	70
1967	Gulf American Fire & Casualty Co. v. McNeal	154 S.E.2d 411	65
1963	Hayes v. Brown	133 S.E.2d 102	65
1966	Watkins v. Nationwide Mutual Fire Insurance†	113 Ga. App. 801	62
1972	Lewis v. State	190 S.E.2d 123	60
1961	Cox v. DeJarnette	123 S.E.2d 16	49
1968	Brown v. State	165 S.E.2d 185	48
1968	Sanfrantello v. Sears, Roebuck & Co.	163 S.E.2d 256	48
1970	Sisk v. Carney	174 S.E.2d 456	46
1970	Insurance Co. of North America v. Atlas Supply Co.	172 S.E.2d 632	45
1973	Holloway v. Frey· Concurrence†	202 S.E.2d 845	44

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,553 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 John Sammons Bell on?: John Sammons Bell 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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19 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).