The North Carolina Supreme Court this month ended a 30-year lawsuit over funding for the state’s public education system. This opinion is well known, but Leandro Although the cases were ostensibly decided on technical grounds, it is clear that state courts will not enforce the North Carolina Constitution’s commitment to public education as enshrined in the Declaration of Rights any time soon.
Leandro The original plaintiffs were students and their parents in five counties, and the school boards of those counties. They challenged the constitutionality of North Carolina’s school financing system. After some back and forth over whether to dismiss the charges for failure to state a claim, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled in 1997 that the North Carolina Constitution protects the right to a “sound basic education.” It provided guidelines such as student performance on standardized tests and school funding levels to determine whether education was constitutionally adequate. The court also rejected the argument that the North Carolina Constitution requires equal educational opportunity for students in different school districts. The case was sent back to the lower court to hear the claims.
Subsequent legal proceedings established that many aspects of North Carolina’s education system, while constitutional, deprive many at-risk students of a constitutionally appropriate education. Over the next decade, the trial court in Hoke County, in the south-central part of the state, produced an extensive evidentiary record showing persistent and systemic deficiencies in educational outcomes, teacher quality, and resources. The court repeatedly left the development of remedies to the political branch, but the governor and the Legislature were unable to take satisfactory action. Ultimately, North Carolina and the remaining plaintiffs agreed to a remediation plan that requires the state to increase education funding from 2021 to 2028. But the state legislature, known as the state legislature, did not provide funding.
In a 4-3 decision in 2022, the North Carolina Supreme Court directed the trial court to calculate how much additional money the state would need to provide given recent budget trends and ordered state leaders to fund the first few years of the improvement plan.
In 2023, a trial court ruled that $677.8 million was needed to ensure North Carolina met its constitutional obligation to provide an adequate education. But he declined to order lawmakers to actually provide the needed funds, citing a restraining order from the North Carolina Court of Appeals. (A writ of prohibition is a way for a higher court to prevent a lower court from taking certain steps in a case.)
The 2022 midterm elections were held after the North Carolina Supreme Court’s ruling but before lower courts issued orders, changing the composition of the North Carolina Supreme Court from a Democratic majority to a Republican majority. The General Assembly appealed the trial court’s order for lack of subject matter jurisdiction to enter the order. Earlier this month, the North Carolina Supreme Court agreed in a ruling that now reads: Hoke County Board of Education vs. State of North Carolina. Chief Justice Newby, who joined in the active opposition to the court’s 2022 opinion, wrote for the majority opinion:
The majority rejected the whole thing. Leandro The suit was prejudiced because the parties did not take appropriate steps to invoke the court’s subject matter jurisdiction to issue orders made at a later stage in the litigation. The court cited two reasons for this decision. First, the law cited a statute that states, “No order or judgment shall be entered, except by a three-judge panel of the Wake County Superior Court, finding an act of the General Assembly invalid on its face because such act violates the North Carolina Constitution or federal law.” Wake County is located in central North Carolina and surrounds the state capital, Raleigh. The law further required that such challenges filed outside Wake County be transferred to Wake County. Because Hoke County Superior Court issued this order, the court said, it lacked jurisdiction under this provision.
Second, the court held that the court’s subject matter jurisdiction is limited to the specific issues and relief sought in the complaint. The court said that by 2017, the facts and issues had evolved such that complaints filed before that date no longer properly invoked jurisdiction over the case. The court noted that the original plaintiffs, who filed their complaint in 1994, only raised issues that applied to North Carolina’s education system. In the decades since then, the court argued, the case has turned into a facial challenge. Additionally, he emphasized that North Carolina has made many changes to its education system over the years, making it significantly different from the system that the original plaintiffs challenged.
A charitable reading of the opinion suggests that the case, which spanned decades and included the original plaintiffs leaving the school and the intervention and expulsion of numerous parties, has now become a strange vehicle for challenging the constitutionality of North Carolina’s education system. Justice Richard Dietz dissented, asserting subject matter jurisdiction but acknowledging that the procedural developments in the case were troubling.
Nevertheless, there is nothing in the text of the North Carolina Constitution or the Code of Civil Procedure that imposes a subject-matter jurisdiction requirement in the case that the court has applied. Let’s start with the court’s analysis of the law requiring challenges to General Assembly laws in Wake County. The court said the failure to comply was a serious subject matter jurisdiction defect, but described Wake County as “exclusive jurisdiction.” venue to the constitutional challenges raised. ” Venue law governs where litigation takes place geographically within a particular court system. In contrast, subject matter jurisdiction asks whether the court system has the authority to hear a particular case. kinds of complaints. A party may not waive any objection to subject matter jurisdiction, but may waive any objection to venue if it is not timely raised. This difference shows that venue and subject matter jurisdiction are not interchangeable concepts. The court erred in confusing them.
Equally perplexing is the decision by 2017 that the court lacked subject matter jurisdiction because the facts, issues raised, and relief sought were so different from the original complaint that no amended complaint had been filed that adequately addressed the new circumstances. The majority argued that its analysis “represents principles of due process and fundamental fairness” because “fundamental fairness requires that the party filing the complaint notify the opposing party of the nature of the alleged wrong and the relief sought.” This is a consideration typically invoked in the context of a motion to dismiss a complaint for failure to state a claim or a motion for a clearer statement, and may actually be the basis for dismissal or requiring a party to file an amended claim. However, that is not a basis for saying that the court lacks subject matter jurisdiction to dismiss the complaint or require it to be amended. To strengthen its approach to subject matter jurisdiction, the majority cited language from several previous decisions, including a North Carolina Court of Appeals case that incidentally stated that subject matter jurisdiction exists only for claims “presented in the form of a proper pleading.” However, in this case, the Court of Appeals held that the lower court lacked subject matter jurisdiction to order the sheriff’s department: no There was a lawsuit Until now Submitted.
Finally, as the dissent pointed out, the decision to dismiss the case with prejudice for lack of subject matter jurisdiction was puzzling. A dismissal with prejudice prevents the plaintiff from re-filing the case and usually involves a judgment on the merits of the claim. The lack of subject matter jurisdiction, especially on the technical grounds enumerated here, is typical of courts. do not have Judgment on the merits of the claim.
The court ended with a warning that the North Carolina Constitution, in its view, “does not give the judicial branch the authority to resolve policy disputes among other branches of government or to determine education policy.” This observation is premised on legitimate concerns about the relative institutional capacity to address education. Lawmakers have more flexibility and resources to craft better education policy than judges. Of course, North Carolina remains the only state without a budget, so there are limits to comfort. It also currently ranks second-lowest among states in per-pupil funding.
Students should expect that the courts will not enforce their right to a sound basic education enshrined in the North Carolina Constitution for some time. But not all hope is lost. Indeed, this decision gives those passionate about public education new opportunities to improve the system and assert their role in enforcing constitutional rights. North Carolina first enshrined the right to public education in its 1868 constitution. Delegates made a special case for ratification because slavery had been abolished only a few years earlier, and because so many North Carolinians had recently been denied education. They asked voters to consider:
Anyone may be able to tell the difference in success in life between the educated and the uneducated, but the uneducated are often endowed with higher intellectual powers. The reason for his failure is that it has not been developed. We propose that the nation “level up” to give every possible child the opportunity to develop their intellectual talents to the fullest. There is no need to prove the legitimacy of an effort so noble.
We are all too accustomed to leaving the interpretation and enforcement of constitutional rights to judges. But lawmakers who make spending decisions also take an oath to uphold the state constitution. North Carolina voters should insist that their legislators take this oath seriously and treat public education as a core constitutional promise. The Constitution not only provides rules for judges to apply in deciding cases; It also conveys the dreams of society. Perhaps instead of asking for a minimum level of school funding to get through the courts, lawmakers could imagine what an education system that truly lived up to the vision of the framers of the 1868 Constitution would look like.
Marcus Gadson is an associate professor of law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Recommended quote: Marcus Gadson North Carolina Supreme Court throws out decades-old right-to-education caseSᴛᴀᴛᴇ Cᴏᴜʀᴛ Rᴇᴘᴏʀᴛ (April 13, 2026), https://statecourtreport.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/north-carolina-supreme-court-throws-out-decades-old-right-education-case
