With a rising number of divisive laws being challenged in courts across the country — including those addressing same-sex marriage, immigration and voting rights – some attorneys general are refusing to defend their states, agreeing that such laws are unconstitutional. Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane announced in July that she wouldn’t defend that state’s same sex marriage ban in a pending federal lawsuit.

It started out as a simple bill allowing parties in family court to appeal rulings before their cases were finally resolved. By the time it landed on the House floor for a final vote, one of the last bills on the last day of the long session, it had a new name, a new number and a new purpose: to give the justices of the state Supreme Court the sole authority to discipline judges — including themselves –and allow them to decide if, when and who to discipline in secret. 

Here’s one word you don’t often hear being bandied about in the General Assembly while debates continue over charter schools, vouchers and funding: Segregation. To many, it’s a term for the archives, the stuff of black-and-white highlight reels. But this Monday, in federal court in Greenville, segregation will be front-and-center as Senior U.S. District Judge Malcolm Howard opens hearings in a case involving an order that dates back to 1965.

It didn’t take long for Gov. Pat McCrory to put pen to paper and sign off on the repeal of the state’s landmark Racial Justice Act, making good on his campaign promise to rid North Carolina of legislation he once called a joke.

In an off year, Monday’s decision upholding the state’s 2011 redistricting plan would have run as the headline story for most dailies in North Carolina. It was still page one, certainly, but the latest chapter of our decennial redistricting litigation couldn’t compete with a legislature mired in controversy and scrambling to meet deadlines before adjourning for the summer. Instead, more Moral Monday arrests and continuing fallout from the anti-Sharia anti-abortion sneak attack led the news of the day. Not surprisingly, the legislators who won felt vindicated and proclaimed victory.

Election Day 2016: Voter photo ID. No Sunday voting. Fewer, if any, early voting days. And no same-day registration. Sound like we’re expanding access to the polls? Not in North Carolina, now that legislators have been sprung from the restraints of Voting Rights Act preclearance. Just hours after the U.S. Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder gutted the requirement that certain states and local governments get Justice Department approval of proposed voting changes, Republican lawmakers here promised quick passage of a voting bill that would set the state back decades. “Now we can go with the full bill,” Senator Tom Apodaca told WRAL, referring to an omnibus voting bill that would do more than just require voter ID; it would reduce early voting, eliminate Sunday voting and ban same-day registration.

Kevin Tully has seen plenty in his 25 years as a public defender, both from clients and from the young attorneys he manages as head of the Mecklenburg County office. But nothing quite matches the time recently when three of his junior public defenders—fresh out of a training session at the Southern Public Defender Training Center—told him that the office wasn’t doing its job.

“Gideon’s Army,” a film by Dawn Porter which portrays the lives of three young public defenders working in the south, opens this year’s Full Frame Documentary Festival in Durham on April 4, 2013, at 7:30 p.m.

After Paul Dacier became EMC Corporation’s first in-house attorney in 1990, he soon realized that the data storage company would need more than patents and lawyers to protect its intellectual property. It would have to become an aggressive litigant. Dacier was promoted to general counsel in 1993, the same year that Storage Technology Corporation sued Hopkinton, Massachusetts–based EMC.

Here’s one thing we can all agree on: Election 2012 revealed plenty in need of fixing at the polls in North Carolina. Long lines in places ill-equipped to handle the volume, voter frustration and unbridled electioneering were captured in unflattering media reports about pushing and shouting, interrogations by poll observers, and this: “A guy driving a tractor-trailer bed filled with effigies of Democratic officials, including President Barack Obama, with nooses around their neck.”

It’s been nearly a decade since the New York Times profiled the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond—the court of last resort for the vast majority of cases filed in federal courts in North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia —as “the most aggressively conservative federal appeals court in the nation.”

The ex-players who are suing the national football league for concussion-related ailments have put together their legal team, and it’s packed with mass tort all-stars.

It’s been more than 40 years since Jeffrey MacDonald was accused of brutally murdering his pregnant wife and two young daughters in their house on Castle Drive in Fort Bragg. Stabbed several times himself, MacDonald told military police on the scene that a group of hippies – including a woman in a white floppy hat chanting “acid is groovy” and “kill the pigs”– were to blame.

Just a little under a year ago, Patrick Collins Inc., a California-based film company, sued 44 people for copyright infringement in federal court in Raleigh, accusing each of illegally downloading its movie, “Cuties 2.” The defendants, whose identities were unknown, all were listed as “John Doe.” Five months later, without serving a single summons, the company dismissed the case against 42 of the defendants, some of whom presumably agreed to pay a settlement. At this point, only one defendant remains: a grandmother in her 60s who hasn’t a clue about downloading files on her computer.

A late night stop for a suspected DWI. The driver out of the car, stumbling through sobriety tests. A heated exchange and loud refusal to participate in breath or blood tests.

It had to be done. That’s what North Carolina state Rep. George Cleveland thought last April when he introduced a bill barring courts from applying foreign law in instances where such law would lead to a violation of constitutional rights.

In late January, Texas-based Smart Start Inc. proudly announced its entrée into North Carolina as the first provider of breath alcohol interlock ignition devices to be certified under new Division of Motor Vehicle standards and procedures. The devices, known by the acronym BAIID, disable a car’s ignition if the driver blows a breath alcohol concentration above a set limit.

One day last spring, as the wave of protest movements swept across the Middle East into Bahrain and troops arrived to restore order, the phone rang in John Knight’s office. The streets were unsettled, the markets were volatile, and Knight, who is chief operating officer for Mumtalakat Holding Company, the investment arm for the Kingdom of Bahrain, was engaged in his first encounter with martial law. Any number of emergencies could have been waiting on the other line.

When Paula Smith and her husband put their house in Winston-Salem up for sale nine years ago, they had plenty of lookers, but no buyers. They couldn’t figure out why, until they learned that the state planned to route the eastern loop of the Northern Beltway close to their neighbor’s house.

Ann Majestic arrived at the National Press Club in Washington with little time to spare. “How was lunch?” the Wake County School Board attorney asked the audience. “We weren’t allowed to leave North Carolina until we could bring the weather, so we arrived just in time with lots of weather.” She was there on a snowy Thursday to speak about public school choice and integration – along with New York Times reporter Steven Holmes, American Federation of Teachers president Sandra Feldman and Century Foundation Senior Fellow Richard Kahlenberg, whose new book, All Together Now: Creating Middle Class Schools through Public School Choice, grounded the forum.