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 2017 / Active

Nels S.D. Peterson

Chief Justice, Supreme Court of Georgia

Nels S.D. Peterson is a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Georgia, serving since 2017. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Tenure: Since 2017 · 9 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
2017	Supreme Court of Georgia	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Peterson authored 83 published opinions for the court (2017–2019), plus 2 dissents and 6 concurrences. Most cited: Elliott v. State (196 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. 91 of these were attributed to Peterson 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
2019	Elliott v. State†	824 S.E.2d 265	196
2017	Olevik v. State†	302 Ga. 228	150
2017	Anglin v. State†	302 Ga. 333	118
2018	State v. Almanza†	820 S.E.2d 1	98
2017	Brooks v. State†	301 Ga. 748	62
2017	Booth v. State†	301 Ga. 678	59
2017	State v. Riggs†	301 Ga. 63	57
2017	Bozzie v. State†	302 Ga. 704	55
2017	Adkins v. State†	301 Ga. 153	53
2018	Kemp v. State†	810 S.E.2d 515	52
2017	Grange Mutual Casualty Co. v. Woodard†	300 Ga. 848	49
2019	City of Guyton v. Barrow†	828 S.E.2d 366	47
2019	Mims v. State†	823 S.E.2d 325	46
2018	Brock v. Hardman†	814 S.E.2d 736	38
2017	Gibson v. Gibson†	301 Ga. 622	34

Showing the 15 most-cited of 91 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 is Nels S.D. Peterson on?: Nels S.D. Peterson is a Chief 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.

9 years on the Supreme Court of Georgia. Data as of 2026-07-02. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).