North Carolina Lawyers Weekly

As they are ordinarily understood, the terms used in South Carolina’s disorderly conduct statute – “disorderly,” “boisterous,” “obscene,” and “profane” – make it hard to escape the conclusion that any person passing a schoolyard during recess is likely witnessing a ...

Tagged with: Constitutional

To the extent several subsections of North Carolina’s Property Protection Act punish newsgathering activities, those subsections violate the First Amendment. We affirm the district court’s determination that the subsections or the Property Protection Act (the Act) violate plaintiffs’ constitutional rights ...

Tagged with: Constitutional

Plaintiff has sufficiently alleged a town policy that violates his right to free speech: a ban on livestreaming a traffic stop by police. At the motion-to-dismiss stage, the town has not shown that the alleged policy is sufficiently grounded in ...

Tagged with: Constitutional

A North Carolina statute, G.S. § 163-274(a)(9) (the Act), may be unconstitutional because it outlaws any derogatory comment “made in reckless disregard of its truth or falsity.” Such a comment may be true, and the First Amendment does not permit ...

Tagged with: Constitutional

Starting in late March 2020, Dare County, North Carolina, prohibited non-resident property owners from entering the county. Although the Virginia plaintiffs were unable to reside in their property for 45 days because of the lockdown, Dare County did not “take” ...

Tagged with: Constitutional

The plaintiff-students have stated claims for breach of contract, based on the defendant-university system’s transition to online-only learning during the spring semester of 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, defendant is entitled to immunity under G.S. § 116-311, ...

Tagged with: Constitutional

Where a church was aware of zoning restrictions when it purchased property, it could not have had a reasonable expectation of religious land use, dooming its claim under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act or RLUIPA. Because the ...

After being assessed a civil penalty for running a red light in Greenville, plaintiff brought a challenge under our state constitution’s prohibition against “local” laws “relating to health…” N.C. Const. art. II, § 24(1)(a). However, plaintiff’s challenge was brought, not ...

Fines collected pursuant to the City of Greenville’s red light camera program are paid to the school board, but the city violates N.C. Const. art. IX, § 7 and G.S. § 115C-437 when it charges the school board for enforcement ...

Although the statutes enacting the State Health Plan did not themselves establish a contract requiring the state to provide a premium-free preferred provider organization health insurance plan which allocated 80 percent of the costs of health care services to the ...