Courts

North Carolina election officials won't order another recount in a close state Supreme Court race after a partial hand recount failed to suggest the trailing Republican candidate could overtake the Democratic incumbent.

The very close election for a North Carolina Supreme Court seat heads next to a hand recount even as election officials announced a machine recount of over 5.5 million ballots resulted in no margin change between the candidates.

CNN wants a defamation lawsuit against it filed by North Carolina's lieutenant governor dismissed. Mark Robinson filed the suit against the network for its report saying he once made explicit posts on a pornography website's message board. The September report nearly led to the collapse of the Republican's campaign for governor.

An already close race for a North Carolina Supreme Court seat reached a razor-thin margin as most counties completed final tallies from the Nov. 5 election.

A judge granted a motion to dismiss a lawsuit alleging Penn caused emotional distress and defamed a woman, writing that the filing did not properly substantiate the claims.

A North Carolina appeals court has decided a trial judge wrongly found a potential juror in criminal contempt for refusing to wear a mask in 2022 due to COVID-19.

A woman alleges in a lawsuit she was pressured to have an abortion by Winston-Salem Police Chief William Penn and threatened with criminal charges if she kept contacting him.

A federal judge has ruled a provision in North Carolina's abortion laws requiring doctors to document the location of a pregnancy before prescribing abortion pills should be blocked permanently. But U.S. District Judge Catherine Eagles restored on Friday another provision she halted last year that required abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy be performed in hospitals. She said the law requiring physicians to document the "intrauterine location of a pregnancy" before a medication abortion is performed is unconstitutionally vague. Her decisions don't halt most of the 2023 abortion law enacted by the Republican-controlled General Assembly. That says abortions can be performed after 12 weeks only under some exceptions.

In an effort to make its website and self-help resources more accessible and more user-friendly for low-income North Carolinians, Legal Aid of North Carolina's Innovation Lab has developed an AI-powered virtual assistant in collaboration with LawDroid. The Legal Information Assistant (LIA) was recently launched.