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 1943 / Served to 1953

William Y. Atkinson Jr.

Justice, Supreme Court of Georgia

William Y. Atkinson Jr. was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Georgia, who joined the court in 1943. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1887–1953
Tenure: 1943–1953 · 10 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1943	Supreme Court of Georgia	–	–

Judicial Record

In our data, Atkinson authored 624 published opinions for the court (1897–1953), plus 32 dissents and 14 concurrences. Most cited: Lefkoff v. Sicro (84 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. 81 of these were attributed to Atkinson 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
1939	Lefkoff v. Sicro· Dissent	6 S.E.2d 687	84
1950	Adler v. Adler	61 S.E.2d 824	65
1951	Harris v. Duncan	67 S.E.2d 692	59
1947	Hall v. State· Dissent	44 S.E.2d 234	57
1940	Harris v. State· Concurrence	12 S.E.2d 64	55
1946	Associated Mutuals Inc. v. Pope Lumber Co.· Dissent	37 S.E.2d 393	50
1944	Bryant v. State	30 S.E.2d 259	49
1932	Boykin v. Hopkins· Dissent	162 S.E. 796	48
1941	Guffin v. Kelly· Dissent	14 S.E.2d 50	47
1945	Myrick v. State	34 S.E.2d 36	44
1941	Fowler v. Southern Airlines Inc.	16 S.E.2d 897	44
1941	City of Albany v. Lippitt· Concurrence	13 S.E.2d 807	41
1945	Smithwick v. State	34 S.E.2d 28	40
1897	Coffee v. Coffee	101 Ga. 787	38
1944	Manley v. Combs	30 S.E.2d 485	36

Showing the 15 most-cited of 672 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 William Y. Atkinson Jr. on?: William Y. Atkinson Jr. 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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10 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).