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 1990 / Former Justice

Robert Benham

Justice, Supreme Court of Georgia

Robert Benham was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Georgia, who joined the court in 1990. He previously served on the Court of Appeals of Georgia. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1946 · age 80
Tenure: 1990 · 36 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1984	Court of Appeals of Georgia	–	–
1990	Supreme Court of Georgia	–	–

Education

Tuskegee University
Tuskegee University
University of Georgia

Judicial Record

In our data, Benham authored 2,174 published opinions for the court (1984–2019), plus 249 dissents and 129 concurrences. Most cited: Rowland v. State (927 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. 1,124 of these were attributed to Benham 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
1995	Rowland v. State	264 Ga. 872	927
1997	Robinson v. Kroger Co.	493 S.E.2d 403	568
1994	Vansant v. State	264 Ga. 319	478
2004	Jones v. State	604 S.E.2d 483	429
2000	Jones v. State· Dissent†	537 S.E.2d 80	243
2001	Miller v. State	546 S.E.2d 524	240
2004	Fuller v. State	591 S.E.2d 782	227
1991	Mallory v. State· Concurrence†	409 S.E.2d 839	221
1999	Felix v. State	523 S.E.2d 1	201
1997	Jones v. Townsend	480 S.E.2d 24	190
1998	Wall v. State	500 S.E.2d 904	183
1999	Clark v. State	515 S.E.2d 155	167
2007	Murphy v. Bajjani	647 S.E.2d 54	160
1998	Hanifa v. State	505 S.E.2d 731	157
2017	Voyles v. Voyles†	301 Ga. 44	150

Showing the 15 most-cited of 2,552 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 Robert Benham on?: Robert Benham 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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36 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).