Georgia Lawyer Spotlight
| Jurisdiction | Georgia,United States |
| Citation | Vol. 27 No. 6 Pg. 0044 |
| Pages | 0044 |
| Publication year | 2022 |
A Conversation with Chief Justice David E. Nahmias
In this installment of the "Georgia Lawyer Spotlight," Editorial Board member Jacob E. Daly interviews Chief Justice David E. Nahmias, Supreme Court of Georgia, as his retirement from the bench draws closer.
BY JACOB E. DALY
The transcript of this interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Now that your retirement from the Supreme Court is imminent, how do you assess your tenure and your impact on the development of Georgia law?
I think I brought back to the Court a focus on constitutional and statutory text as originally understood. That is how our Court and virtually every other American court understood judicial roles until progressive political thinkers started telling judges they should be policymakers. I think textualism and originalism have become a real focus of our Court, and the Court of Appeals, and that has a significant impact on how judges decide cases. Second, I tried very hard to make sure that our opinions were consistent and clear, because one of the biggest problems for any legal system is when you have binding appellate cases that are slightly different from one another on a point. That leaves nobody sure what the law is, and worse, you can't really figure out what the law is unless you are willing not only to take the case to court but also to take it past the trial court to the Court of Appeals and finally to the Supreme Court for us to say, "Oh, yeah, we did not mean what we said in this one opinion, but we meant what we said in this other opinion." Trying to get the law clear and consistent has been important.
How is originalism different on the federal and state levels?
Another thing that has happened, and this is partly me but really a lot of my newer colleagues, is reviving the idea that we have a state constitution that is different than the federal constitution. There's a lot more in Georgia's Constitution, and we have had 10 constitutions in Georgia. The most recent was adopted in 1983. It is a lot easier to figure out the original meaning of the 1983 Georgia Constitution than the 1789 U.S. Constitution. But it also creates complications, because when you have language that is in the 1983 Georgia Constitution but was also in the Georgia Constitutions of 1777, 1868 or 1877, that creates some interpretive issues that we explored in a series of opinions that Justice Nels Peterson wrote about DUI self-incrimination issues. That has been another significant development in the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court of Georgia.
Why are textualism and originalism important?
If you tell judges to do what they think is reasonable, they will do what they think is right, because every judge on Earth thinks he or she is a reasonable person. That's just an open...
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