Georgia Supreme Court Justice Visits Alpharetta Rotary

Justice came to the Alpharetta Rotary Club on April 22. Justice David E. Nahmias, a member of the Supreme Court of Georgia, spoke to the Rotarians about the importance of the court.

The court has the final say on all questions on state law.

"We're not final because we are infallible. We are infallible because we are final," Nahmias said.

The seven justices of the court do more work than their counterparts in the U.S. Supreme Court, Nahmias said. Each justice writes an average of 50 opinions a year, while the entire U.S. Supreme Court only handles 80 to 90 per year, and it has nine members. The U.S. Supreme Court justices have four law clerks, while Georgia's justices have two each.

"We product about five times the output with half the help," Nahmias said.

He has experience now in both courts, as he worked as a law clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Nahmias shared some terms unique to the court. A justice assigned a case may not side with the majority, so he might try to convince his fellow jurists to back his minority view through the writing of the court's opinion. That's called writing uphill.

Cases that are nearing a deadline are called distressed cases, and there's even a distress list.

Nahmias said that while the state Supreme Court has a lot of hard cases to decide, the stress level is way below what he felt as the U.S. Attorney for the North District of Georgia. He worked terrorism cases in which a mistake could literally costs thousands of lives. But on the court, a momentary act of stupidity is tempered because three other justices would have to make the same stupid mistake for it to have an effect.

He told the Rotarians that voters should ask judges about their philosophy of law. He believes in enforcing the law as it is written, and not looking for the spirit of the law. The words can be read, but the spirit is something that can't be discovered.

It's not the justices' place to make the laws evolve, he said.