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 1947 / Served to 1961

John Murphy Clagett Townsend

Judge, Court of Appeals of Georgia

John Murphy Clagett Townsend was a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Georgia, who joined the court in 1947. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1899–1961
Tenure: 1947–1961 · 14 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1947	Court of Appeals of Georgia	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Townsend authored 1,281 published opinions for the court (1947–1961), plus 35 dissents and 46 concurrences. Most cited: Georgia Power Company v. Blum (78 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. 401 of these were attributed to Townsend 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
1949	Georgia Power Company v. Blum	57 S.E.2d 18	78
1955	Atlantic Coast Line Railroad v. Coxwell	91 S.E.2d 135	67
1950	Atlanta Journal Co. v. Doyal	60 S.E.2d 802	66
1952	Wright v. Wright	70 S.E.2d 152	59
1960	Curtis v. State	118 S.E.2d 264	52
1951	Anthony v. State	68 S.E.2d 150	50
1956	Augusta Amusements, Inc. v. Powell	92 S.E.2d 720	47
1955	Hoffman v. National Surety Corp.	85 S.E.2d 784	46
1947	Auld v. Colonial Stores Inc.	45 S.E.2d 827	45
1957	Allstate Insurance Co. v. Buck	100 S.E.2d 142	43
1960	Fields v. Jackson	115 S.E.2d 877	42
1951	Glover v. City Council of Augusta	63 S.E.2d 422	41
1950	Hill v. Davison-Paxon Co.	57 S.E.2d 680	41
1960	Jones v. Hutchins	113 S.E.2d 475	40
1958	Atlanta Joint Terminals v. Knight	106 S.E.2d 417	40

Showing the 15 most-cited of 1,362 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 Murphy Clagett Townsend on?: John Murphy Clagett Townsend was a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Georgia.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

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14 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).