The North Carolina Advocates for Justice (NCAJ), along with the ACLU of North Carolina Legal Foundation, North Carolina Association of Educators, and North Carolina Troopers Association, have submitted an amicus brief to the N.C. Court of Appeals in Adkins v. Stanly County Board of Education.  The brief argues that the school board violated the plaintiff’s right of access to the courts, in violation of the Open Courts provision of the State Constitution, by firing her because she had filed a lawsuit in state court against the board and defendant Talley.   Burton Craige and Narendra Ghosh represented the NCAJ on the brief.

Categories: News of the Firm Tags: Amicus, Appeals, Briefs, Burton Craige, Constitutional Law, Labor and Employment, Narendra Ghosh, NC Court of Appeals, NCAJ

Burton Craige spoke at a North Carolina Bar Association CLE on Sex, Family, and the Constitution, which was put together by the NCBA Constitutional Rights & Responsibilities and Family Law Sections.  He spoke on the topic of child custody by non-biological parents.  He presented a paper, written along with Narendra Ghosh, entitled Custody Disputes Between Natural Parents and Third Parties: Mason, Estroff, and Heatzig and Beyond.  Burton was one the of the lawyers for the plaintiff in Heatzig.

Summary: With increasing frequency, state courts have been confronted with custody disputes between the biological mother and a former same-sex partner who shared the responsibility of raising the child. In 2008, the North Carolina appellate courts addressed the issue for the first time. In a trio of unanimous decisions – Mason v. Dwinnell, Estroff v. Chatterjee, and Heatzig v. MacLean – the North Carolina Court of Appeals defined the circumstances in which the former partner would be entitled to a custody determination based on the best interest of the child. Because the opinions apply the law to three sets of facts, they provide especially helpful guidance to attorneys and the trial courts.

Categories: News of the Firm Tags: Appeals, Articles, Burton Craige, Case Commentary, Constitutional Law, Family Law, Narendra Ghosh, NCBA, Presentation

At the 24th Annual North Carolina/South Carolina Labor and Employment Law CLE held in Asheville, Jonathan Harkavy presented his 2007-08 annual review of the Supreme Court’s employment law cases.  His paper is entitled Supreme Court of the United States Employment Law Commentary, 2007 Term.

Summary: The 2007 Term of the Supreme Court of the United States provided fresh and persuasive evidence of the centrality of work in our lives and the significance of employment law in our jurisprudence during this first decade of the new century. Nearly one out of four civil cases on the Court’s opinion docket involved disputes concerning some aspect of employer-employee relations. How the law regulates and affects the employment relationship thus continued to find detailed, if not fully coherent, expression in the Court’s opinions during the 2007 Term. This paper first reviews the term’s decisions arranged largely by subject matter. The italicized paragraphs preceding and following the cases offer some personal commentary on the decisions and their likely impact on workers, employers, and their lawyers, and more generally on our employment laws. Following this term’s cases are brief summaries of the grants of certiorari in employment-related cases for the 2008 Term. The paper concludes with a brief observation about the structure of federal employment law in the wake of the Court’s recent decisions.

Categories: News of the Firm Tags: Articles, Case Commentary, Constitutional Law, Jonathan Harkavy, Labor and Employment, NCBA, Presentation, US Supreme Court