On April 7, Wake Forest College Democrats welcomed North Carolina Supreme Court Associate Justice Anita Earls to speak to students. 

Earls is in her eighth year serving on the North Carolina Supreme Court since being elected in 2018. She is currently campaigning to maintain her seat in the 2026 midterms against North Carolina state Rep. Sarah Stevens (R). 

During the event, Earls spoke about her pathway to becoming a state Supreme Court justice. Prior to running for the office, she served as a civil rights attorney in North Carolina for 30 years.  

“It seemed really important to try to enforce the laws [such as] the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965… federal laws that were intended to end those patterns of racial segregation and give everyone equal opportunity,” she said. “That’s what I wanted to do.”

Earls shared that she was motivated to run for the state Supreme Court by the 2016 election of President Donald Trump. 

“His election kind of brought home to me that federal courts may not be hospitable to the rights of the people and the clients and the communities that I’d been working with… but I thought that state constitutions were also a very rich source of protection of our individual rights,” she said. 

At the time, none of the justices on the North Carolina Supreme Court had experience in civil rights, and Earls believed it was important to have someone with that legal background in the state’s highest court. 

She was elected in the first partisan election for the N.C. Supreme Court since 2002—that year, the N.C. General Assembly reintroduced ballots listing party affiliation alongside candidate names. 

Earls also spoke extensively about various court cases she has presided over in recent years, and how many of these issues, including environmental laws and economic rights, directly influence North Carolina communities. 

One recent example she shared related to the long-running Leandro v. North Carolina education funding lawsuit. In 2022, the N.C. Supreme Court ordered the state to spend an additional $700 million towards public education. Earlier this month, however, Republican state Supreme Court justices voted to dismiss “Leandro,” overturning the court’s authority to compel the state to fund schools. 

“I’m sure that many parents who are frustrated by what is and is not available to their children at their public schools don’t realize that our court has had a pretty big role in that,” Earls said. “And maybe don’t realize that they’re the remote, but they have the option of avoiding who sits on our court.”

In response to a student question, Earls spoke on the issue of party pressures affecting choices within the state Supreme Court. At different points during her eight years in the court, she’s experienced various levels of bipartisan collaboration with Republican justices, she said. Earls said she believes compromise and deliberation are important values, regardless of party affiliations. 

“Having seven perspectives on a single issue is better than just one, and the issues we decide are really important,” she said. “And so we should be listening to each other, we should be understanding each other’s perspectives and points of view. And ideally coming to a decision that, if we don’t all 100% agree with it, at least we all feel it’s a reasonable compromise that will best serve the people of the state.” 

Student attendees said they learned from Earls’s many years of experience and the stories she shared during the event.

“Huge takeaway was that the system isn’t perfect… it really requires people of good character who value being morally sound, and… bipartisan in their politics in order to make the system work the way it theoretically should,” junior attendee Sarah Francis Dewey said.

Wake Forest College Democrats President Caleb Pembele voiced his appreciation for Earls’s willingness to engage directly with Wake Forest students on campus. 

“I was talking with people briefly before they left, and they all thought that Earls was a really great woman to hear from,” he said. “Great story, very passionate about protecting the rights of North Carolinians. People told me that they learned a lot and that they appreciated her being here, especially because she works in Raleigh… so making the drive out here to speak to us—definitely the sacrifice that she’s making does not go unnoticed. And we all really appreciate it.”