The rubber’s about to meet the road in the voting rights lawsuits pending in federal court here as the parties start to ask the hard questions. What were state GOP lawmakers’ intentions when they enacted House Bill 589, one of the most restrictive voting laws in the nation?

After 36 years behind bars, man seeks exoneration. Joseph Sledge may just have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. And for that he’s spent half of his life behind bars. Broke and unemployed in 1973, the Georgia native and Army veteran stole a few boxes of clothes from a department store and landed in a Bladen County prison. While working on a highway litter crew one day in 1976, he got into a fight with another inmate who was then punished with a stint at another prison. When that inmate returned, Sledge – a slight man of 147 pounds – feared for his life and ran.

By all accounts, the 2014 North Carolina Supreme Court race, with four of seven seats up for grabs, is destined for the record books. Already spending in the race is nearing $4 million, with a little under a month to go before votes are counted. And with public financing dollars gone, the candidates are on their own in the escalating hunt for funds.

For years now, complaints about the stench and pollution seeping from the state’s factory hog farms have lingered. In the courts and in the press, residents living with the mess and their advocates have traded barbs with industry and local leaders about failed oversight and influence in the legislature. But now environmental groups have stepped in and, in a precedent-setting complaint filed last week with the Environmental Protection Agency, allege that the state’s lax regulation of hog waste disposal discriminates against communities of color in eastern North Carolina.

Here’s what happens when a state admits a wrong but then takes years to get to reparations. Records go missing. Memories fade. People die. And the opportunity to provide at least some recompense is lost. That sad truth is unfolding now as North Carolina finally moves towards fulfilling long-promised redress to some of the thousands unwillingly sterilized here under the state’s sanctioned eugenics program.

The fate of the state’s proposed Bonner Bridge project remains hanging in the balance after the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday sent a challenge by conservation groups back to a lower court for further review. In Defenders of Wildlife v. NCDOT, the judges unanimously ruled that the lower court failed to consider requirements relating to the protection of wildlife refuge land — here, the Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge on Hatteras Island, through which the battered NC-12 runs – when determining if the project complied federal law.

All white and overwhelmingly male- Latest departure leaves NC federal courts among least diverse in the nation. It’s been more than 3,000 days since U.S. District Judge Malcolm Howard announced that he would be stepping down from his position on the federal court in eastern North Carolina. At roughly the same time, the then-freshman senator from North Carolina, Richard Burr, stood lecturing his colleagues on the senate floor about their blocking of votes for nominees to the federal bench.

Sweeping voting changes rushed into law by state lawmakers last summer will face a critical test next week when a federal judge in Winston-Salem considers constitutional challenges to their viability. On Monday morning, U.S. District Judge Thomas D. Schroeder, appointed to the court by then-President George W. Bush in 2008, will consider evidence and arguments in hearings expected to last at least a week. At issue will be House Bill 589, dubbed the “monster voting bill” by voting rights advocates and uniformly called one of the most restrictive election laws in the nation.

Tucked away near the end of the 250-page Senate budget, in between the section slashing funds for legal services and the section forecasting cuts to state cultural resources, lies a proposal which would change the rules of the game in which state lawmakers now find themselves deeply entrenched: defending their laws from constitutional challenges. From voting rights to school vouchers to issues of local rule, the members of the General Assembly are fending off claims in at least a dozen lawsuits that laws enacted during the long session violate state and federal constitutions.

Steven Pruner learned the hard way that in North Carolina, selling a hot dog can get you jail time. Imagine his surprise when, in 2011, the vendor was charged and later convicted for operating his cart without a license near Duke University Medical Center – an offense which got him 45 days in the custody of the Durham County sheriff (a sentence later suspended to probation). Steve Cooksey almost suffered a similar fate when, after fighting his own diabetes and sharing insights into his recovery on his blog, he learned that his advice to readers constituted the unlicensed practice of dietetics, a misdemeanor offense under catchall provisions of the administrative code.

It started with a flickering brake light on Nicholas Heien’s Ford Escort. He was asleep in the back seat while Maynor Javier Vasquez drove the car along Interstate 77 in Surry County during the early morning hours in April 2009, when Officer Matt Darisse of the Surry County Sheriff’s Department flipped on his blue lights to stop the car. The officer told Vasquez he had pulled the Escort over for a non-functioning brake light.

Shortly after the General Assembly reduced the number of early voting days from 17 to 10 as part of sweeping voting changes enacted last session, Gov. Pat McCrory took to the airwaves to defend the move. “We didn’t shorten early voting,” the governor said in a clip that went viral. “We compacted the calendar, but we’re going to have the same hours in which polls are open in early voting and we’re going to have more polls available.”

What started out last week as news of the temporary closure of the Bonner Bridge on the Outer Banks for claimed emergency repairs quickly morphed into partisan sniping, with GOP officials deflecting blame for the state’s decades-long delay in addressing environmental problems there by attacking environmentalists who’d filed a lawsuit over the bridge two years ago.

Parties in the three federal lawsuits challenging voting law changes signed into law here in August will appear before U.S. District Judge Thomas Schroeder on December 12 to map out a schedule for proceedings moving forward. And while they’ve reached agreement on some preliminary litigation matters, the parties are not budging on one critical date: when the case should be tried.

It’s a storyline straight out of a John Grisham novel. For 15 years and running, two Pittsburgh lawyers fight to bring justice to a small coal mine owner driven into bankruptcy by Don Blankenship, the most powerful coal baron in American history. The courtroom battle starts in a small courtroom in West Virginia, reaches the U.S. Supreme Court and then lands in neighboring Virginia courts, where it continues today.

It’s a troubling story line: A well-heeled and powerful group with a vested interest in the outcome of a lawsuit contributes millions to land a favored justice on a supreme court where its case will likely land. John Grisham used it in his bestseller The Appeal. The U.S. Supreme Court considered the true-to-life version arising out the battle between coal-mining executives in West Virginia in Caperton v. Massey Coal.

The North Carolina Department of Public Safety has adopted a new, single-drug protocol for executions, putting off tomorrow’s scheduled oral argument in the case challenging the constitutionality of the lethal injection procedures used by the state to carry out the death penalty.

For more than ten years, the state of North Carolina acknowledged that poor and disadvantaged children had a constitutional right to a sound basic education, beginning with pre-kindergarten. And for nearly as many years the state worked to provide these at-risk children opportunities for a jump start on that education, crafting a pre-K program that became the envy of other states.

If there’s one message to be gleaned from the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Bumpers v. Community Bank of Northern Virginia, it’s this: When it comes to mortgage lending, consumers better shop around. And not just for the best interest rates and payment terms. Now the onus is on you, borrower, to find the best deal for all those ancillary charges that show up on that mysterious closing form – fees for the title company for example, or a loan settlement provider or even an appraiser.

State GOP lawmakers wasted no time ramping up their efforts to drastically change voting in North Carolina after the U.S. Supreme Court, in Shelby County v. Holder, gutted the requirement that certain jurisdictions get proposed voting changes pre-approved. “Now we can go with the full bill,” Senator Tom Apodaca told WRAL that same day, referring to an omnibus voting bill that