
Happy Friday, defenders! We are excited to unveil a new project at OJD that we have affectionately named Case Law Corner! On the first Friday of each month, you can expect a post with updates and perspectives about recent or important case law to help you in the fight for justice.
Previously, OJD was summarizing new delinquency cases filed by the NC Court of Appeals, the NC Supreme Court, and the occasional US Supreme Court case in our Case Summaries document available to defenders on our website. However, times are changing, and we want to bring you important information in a relevant and accessible format, so we are retiring the old Case Summaries document and switching to blog posts as new cases come out. Don’t worry, the Case Summaries document will still be available on our website to reference older cases but will not include new cases from 2022 forward. Instead, starting with cases published in January 2022 and moving forward, we will post summaries on a monthly basis as they are filed by the appellate courts. The new format will include hashtags to keep the content searchable (for when you need to remember that one case…) but still brief and digestible to stay up to date.
To start off the Case Law Corner series and to honor the most important opinions to date, we want your input to rank the TOP 10 NC cases and the TOP 10 USSC cases! We are asking all of our readers to take a minute of their time to fill out our survey and tell us what delinquency cases or cases involving youth are important and relevant and should make the Top 10 lists – as well as an opportunity for you to provide your opinion as to why you think so. We are looking forward to unveiling the Top 10 lists – along with defender’s thoughts and opinions! – in next month’s Case Law Corner, so make sure to have your answers submitted by August 26.
As if changing the format of the summaries wasn’t cool enough, we have a new twist on the content of the posts as well. We want to make these case summaries digest a little easier than dried cardboard, so we plan to ask the trial and appellate attorneys involved to give us their perspective on the case. So many times, the court opinion neglects to mention important aspects of the reality of the case, or there isn’t room in the opinion for the great moments during trial, but we want to spotlight the real flavor of each of these cases whenever possible. If you were involved in a case that was appealed and an opinion was filed, and you would like to give us some commentary that we can publish in our posts, please use the survey link above to let us know, or email me at Burcu.Hensley@nccourts.org – we want to hear the back story!
We’re so excited to unveil this new format and even more excited to see what you all think the Top 10 NC cases and Top 10 US cases are – only 28 more days to go, but who’s counting? See you all on September 2 for the next installment of Case Law Corner!