Who’ll be North Carolina’s next top justice?

The phrase “shocking announcement” gets bandied about pretty casually, but North Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice Mark Martin’s Jan. 25 announcement that he would resign his seat to become the new dean of Regent University School of Law really was a bolt out of the clear blue sky. Among those who appear to have been caught on the hop was Gov. Roy Cooper, who will now have to choose Martin’s replacement.

As Lawyers Weekly went to press, Cooper still had made no announcement, and Sidebar’s usually reliable whisperers had little guess whom he might tap. But this week alone three appellate court judges have already stepped up to run for a seat on the court in 2020.

First, though, let’s give thanks to the voters of North Carolina, who last fall wisely and overwhelmingly rejected a proposed state constitutional amendment that would have replaced gubernatorial judicial appointments with a convoluted and never-before-tried “merit” system. But for their veto, we’d likely be spending much of 2019 without any chief justice at all.

But other changes wrought by the legislature have complicated the process of filling the seat. Ordinarily, the easy move would be to elevate a Court of Appeals judge to a seat on the Supreme Court. But legislators opted to shrink the Court of Appeals from 15 to 12 judges, meaning that any judge who resigns a seat there will not be replaced, making that a much less appealing option.

Elevating an associate justice to the chief’s spot would create its own issues. Under state law, the new chief justice would have to run for re-election in 2020 rather than wait for their current term to expire. The only justice whose seat is naturally up in 2020 is Republican Paul Newby, who wasted little time announcing that he would seek the chief justice’s seat in 2020, regardless of whom Cooper appoints.

That, in turn, kick-started the race for the associate justice’s seat that Newby will be vacating. Already Republican Phil Berger Jr. and Democrat Lucy Inman have announced that they’ll run for the seat. Anyone Cooper appointed to the bench would presumably have a leg up in running for a full term for the seat, if they so choose.

The Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Warren Daniel, urged Cooper to pick Newby for chief justice and appoint a Republican associate justice to “keep the same partisan makeup of the court,” although it seems rather much more likely that Cooper would choose a Democrat. (Curiously, the proposed constitutional amendment, of which Daniel was a primary sponsor, contained absolutely no requirement that a judge be replaced with one of the same party.)

Ultimately, there are no easy avenues for Cooper to take to square all these various circles, which perhaps helps explain the lengthy wait in naming a replacement. But whomever he chooses, the state’s 2020 judicial elections have very suddenly been kicked into a higher gear.