North Carolina Lawyers Weekly

The 4th Circuit, sitting en banc, holds that a Chapter 13 plan may bifurcate a claim based on an undersecured homestead mortgage into secured and unsecured components and cram down the unsecured component, overruling a 1997 decision that had been ...

Reporter’s complaint against individual agents of the Department of Justice and the United States Postal Service who allegedly engaged in illegal surveillance activities against her and her family were dismissed because the individual agents had still not been identified more ...

The Department of Homeland Security’s decision to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy established in 2012 was arbitrary and capricious because the memo explaining that decision did not identify any basis for the department’s view that the program ...

  Upon approaching defendant, a detective commented on the smell of marijuana. Because of the detective’s surveillance of the area, he knew defendant was lying when he said someone else had been smoking in the area before him. The odor ...

  Where defendant committed felony murder as a juvenile and was sentenced to life with parole, under State v. Seam, ___ N.C. App. ___ (18 December 2018) (COA 18-202), defendant’s sentence is constitutional. Defendant is eligible for parole after serving ...

North Carolina courts have not yet taken a position on the standard necessary to demonstrate that, by wrongdoing, a defendant has forfeited his constitutional right to confront the witnesses against him. We adopt the standard applied by federal courts and ...

The evidence in the light most favorable to plaintiff shows that, had the defendant-doctor properly diagnosed plaintiff as having suffered a stroke and had he timely administered a tissue plasminogen activator, there was only a 40 percent chance that plaintiff’s ...

Where plaintiff alleges that he suffered a stroke at work and that the defendant-employer’s company nurse negligently diagnosed and treated him, plaintiff’s medical negligence claim does not fall under the Workers’ Compensation Act. We affirm the superior court’s denial of ...

  Defendant says he “[refused] his counsel’s recommendation” that they stipulate to his past convictions in a “knee-jerk” fashion. Defendant’s statement is a concession that he understood his trial counsel’s recommendation; the record nowhere reflects that defendant lacked an understanding ...

Even though (1) the state’s expert-witness pathologists’ opinions on the amount of the victim’s blood loss were not based on published reports, were not subject to peer review, and had not been tested for a potential rate of error and ...