Atlanta, July 30, 2025 – The portrait of the Honorable David E. Nahmias, former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Georgia, will be presented in a special ceremony on Thursday, Aug. 7, 2025, at 2:30 p.m. in the Supreme Court courtroom.
Current Chief Justice Nels S.D. Peterson will accept the portrait on behalf of the Supreme Court. The portrait artist is Suzanne Royal.
Justice Nahmias, now a partner at Jones Day’s Atlanta office, served on the Supreme Court for more than a dozen years, authoring more than 470 published opinions. He was appointed to the high court bench in 2009 by then-Gov. Sonny Perdue and later won two statewide elections to six-year terms.
The son of immigrants from Egypt and Germany, Justice Nahmias was born in Atlanta and attended high school in DeKalb County, where he was the state’s STAR student in 1982. He attended Duke University, where he graduated second in his class and summa cum laude, and Harvard Law School, where he graduated magna cum laude and was a classmate of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and an editor of the Harvard Law Review along with former President Barack Obama. Chief Justice Nahmias then served as a law clerk for Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Columbia and for Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court.
After practicing with a large law firm in Washington, D.C., Justice Nahmias joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Atlanta in 1995. As a federal prosecutor, he worked extensively on the investigation of the Centennial Olympic Park and subsequent bombings committed by Eric Robert Rudolph. He also worked on a number of major fraud and public corruption cases, including the successful prosecutions of a Georgia state senator and numerous City of Atlanta and Fulton County public officials and contractors.
Shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Justice Nahmias returned to Washington and became one of the Justice Department’s leading terrorism prosecutors, coordinating the investigation and prosecution of terrorist activity across the country and internationally and assisting in counter-terrorism policymaking. In December 2004, after being nominated by then-President George W. Bush and unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Justice Nahmias returned home as the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia. He served as U.S. Attorney for almost five years before his appointment to the bench, overseeing many major cases including the successful prosecutions of former Atlanta Mayor Bill Campbell, the three Atlanta Police narcotics officers who conspired to violate civil rights by falsifying search warrants, resulting in the police shooting death of 92-year old Kathryn Johnston, and the first Georgians convicted of providing material support to international terrorism.
Media are welcome to cover the presentation event. Any media planning to photograph, video, or broadcast the event should complete a request form online by Friday, Aug. 1, 2025, at 4 p.m. Eastern.