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 2012 / Former Justice

Keith R. Blackwell

Justice, Supreme Court of Georgia

Keith R. Blackwell was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Georgia, who joined the court in 2012. They previously served on the Court of Appeals of Georgia. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: 2012 · 14 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2010	Court of Appeals of Georgia	–	–
2012	Supreme Court of Georgia	–	–

Education

Duke University
Harvard University
University of Georgia
University of Georgia

Judicial Record

In our data, Blackwell authored 373 published opinions for the court (2010–2019), plus 10 dissents and 24 concurrences. Most cited: Deal v. Coleman (498 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. 334 of these were attributed to Blackwell 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
2013	Deal v. Coleman†	294 Ga. 170	498
2013	von Thomas v. State†	293 Ga. 569	454
2016	Olds v. State†	299 Ga. 65	258
2017	Dixon v. State†	302 Ga. 691	191
2015	Hughes v. State†	296 Ga. 744	173
2013	Shaw v. State†	292 Ga. 871	147
2017	Lathrop v. Deal†	301 Ga. 408	111
2013	White v. State†	293 Ga. 523	108
2015	Zaldivar v. Prickett†	297 Ga. 589	103
2013	Arnold v. State†	292 Ga. 268	75
2012	Powell v. State†	291 Ga. 743	75
2011	Strength v. Lovett	714 S.E.2d 723	74
2015	Chan v. Ellis†	296 Ga. 838	73
2011	Benefield v. Tominich· Concurrence†	708 S.E.2d 563	71
2016	Anthony v. State†	298 Ga. 827	70

Showing the 15 most-cited of 407 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 Keith R. Blackwell on?: Keith R. Blackwell 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).