North Carolina Lawyers Weekly

Political organizations argued that an exception for debt collection under the autodialer ban in the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, or TCPA, represented unconstitutional content-based discrimination against other speech. The Fourth Circuit agreed but held that the exception was severable from ...

Where a defendant was incorrectly sentenced as a career criminal based on a drug conviction that did not support the application of the enhancement, the career criminal designation could not be upheld based on the defendant’s state robbery conviction because ...

A garbage truck driver who was terminated for job abandonment after missing a single day of work due to illness had a valid employment discrimination claim because his performance was satisfactory, his employer’s changing rationale for the termination suggested pretext ...

An individual who received grand jury subpoenas seeking financial records for his companies, and who then provided false records to a United States Attorney, could not argue he intended merely to influence the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and not the grand ...

North Carolina’s ban on the unauthorized practice of law is not constitutionally infirm as applied to a trade association because it does not restrict the association’s speech, association or related rights and does not violate the state’s Monopoly Clause. Background ...

Although a prisoner wanted to engage in “communal” feasts as part of his celebration of annual Rastafarian holy days, he provided no direct evidence to show that other inmates would join his gatherings, and thus he could not show prison ...

Where a sheriff terminated a deputy sheriff who supported the sheriff’s opponent during the re-election campaign, he did not violate the law. Background This case arises from Sheriff Michael L. Chapman’s decision not to reappoint Mark F. McCaffrey as a ...

  Even though the individual defendants are both (1) liable for the jury’s punitive damages awards and (2) members of the LLCs to which those punitive damages will be distributed, there is no North Carolina authority for prohibiting a shareholder ...

  Where the parties’ settlement agreement clearly instructs the appraisers chosen thereunder that they are to assume “no material change in … the use of [the country club’s] assets” while appraising plaintiff’s shares, the appraisers may not value the country ...

A criminal defendant’s petition for habeas corpus relief was timely because his state court motion to reduce his sentence constituted an application for collateral review under Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act that tolled the statute of limitations during its ...