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 1967 / Served to 1970

John Eccleston Frankum

Justice, Supreme Court of Georgia

John Eccleston Frankum was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Georgia, who joined the court in 1967. He previously served on the Court of Appeals of Georgia. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1898–1978
Tenure: 1967–1970 · 3 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1960	Court of Appeals of Georgia	–	–
1967	Supreme Court of Georgia	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Frankum authored 511 published opinions for the court (1960–1970), plus 14 dissents and 5 concurrences. Most cited: Clements v. State (70 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. 205 of these were attributed to Frankum 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
1970	Clements v. State	172 S.E.2d 600	70
1968	Strauss v. Stynchcombe	165 S.E.2d 302	69
1966	Mauldin v. Sheffer†	113 Ga. App. 874	66
1968	Tiller v. State· Dissent†	164 S.E.2d 137	61
1961	Bagley v. Firestone Tire & Rubber Company	123 S.E.2d 179	60
1969	Stone Mountain Memorial Ass'n v. Herrington	171 S.E.2d 521	56
1968	Curtis v. State	165 S.E.2d 150	47
1969	Estes v. Perkins	167 S.E.2d 588	41
1969	Smith v. State	168 S.E.2d 587	39
1960	New York Underwriters Insurance v. Noles	115 S.E.2d 474	38
1969	Jackson v. State	170 S.E.2d 281	37
1969	Ballard v. Smith	169 S.E.2d 329	37
1967	United States Fidelity & Guaranty Company v. Evans	158 S.E.2d 243	37
1966	State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company v. Girtman	147 S.E.2d 364	37
1960	Edwards-Warren Tire Co. v. Coble	115 S.E.2d 852	35

Showing the 15 most-cited of 530 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 John Eccleston Frankum on?: John Eccleston Frankum 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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3 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).