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 1992 / Served to 2009

Leah W. Sears

Justice, Supreme Court of Georgia

Leah W. Sears was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Georgia, who joined the court in 1992. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1955 · age 71
Tenure: 1992–2009 · 17 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1992	Supreme Court of Georgia	–	–

Education

Cornell University
Emory University

Judicial Record

In our data, Sears authored 700 published opinions for the court (1992–2009), plus 87 dissents and 100 concurrences. Most cited: Drinkard v. Walker (350 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. 310 of these were attributed to Sears 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
2006	Drinkard v. Walker	636 S.E.2d 530	350
2002	City of Gainesville v. Dodd· Concurrence†	573 S.E.2d 369	257
2000	Jones v. State	537 S.E.2d 80	243
1998	Barnes v. State	496 S.E.2d 674	180
1996	McClain v. State	477 S.E.2d 814	179
2008	Ruffin v. State†	284 Ga. 52	168
1998	Woodard v. State	496 S.E.2d 896	165
1995	Bright v. State	265 Ga. 265	143
1994	Boseman v. State	438 S.E.2d 626	143
1993	City of Rome v. Jordan	426 S.E.2d 861	142
2008	Ruffin v. State	663 S.E.2d 189	137
2003	Zwiren v. Thompson· Dissent†	578 S.E.2d 862	134
1995	Brooks v. Parkerson· Concurrence†	265 Ga. 189	134
2003	Head v. Hill· Dissent†	587 S.E.2d 613	133
2001	Clark v. Wade· Concurrence†	544 S.E.2d 99	131

Showing the 15 most-cited of 887 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 Leah W. Sears on?: Leah W. Sears 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

See something wrong? Report an error. Fixes are logged in the corrections log.

17 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).