How the record is built — and how to check it yourself.
Every decision on this site comes from the published opinion filings of the Supreme Court of North Carolina, at appellate.nccourts.org. We parse the official opinion PDFs directly — no third-party summaries or databases.
Every Supreme Court opinion filing since October 2023, parsed from the official opinion PDFs. Earlier filings are not yet included.
For each decision we record every justice’s position — majority, concurrence, dissent, concurring in part and dissenting in part, or not participating — and who wrote each opinion. Lineups are parsed from the text of the opinion and verified against the PDF.
Per curiam decisions carry no signed author and are labeled as such.
A decision is unanimous when every participating justice joins the result, and divided when at least one dissents in whole or in part.
A party-line split is a divided decision in which every Republican justice is in the majority and every Democratic justice dissents. The label describes the vote, not the reasoning.
For each pair of justices, the agreement rate is the share of shared cases in which they voted the same way. We show it two ways: across the full docket, and across divided cases only. Most cases are unanimous, so full-docket rates run high; the divided view shows the real split.
Where the North Carolina Reports digest (the official subject index) provides a summary, we use it and say so. Otherwise the excerpt shown is the opening of the Court’s opinion, labeled “From the opinion.”
Each decision carries exactly one category — Workplace Rights, Environment, Elections & Voting, Abortion & Healthcare, or Other. Categories are assigned by deterministic published rules that read the court’s own subject-index topics and the text of the opinion, together with a short, committed file of editorially reviewed overrides for the judgment calls the rules get wrong. Both the rules and the overrides live in the repository and change in public.
A category is a way to find decisions, nothing more. It is display-only: it never defines what counts as a divided decision, never selects which cases an agreement rate is computed over, and never weights any figure on this site.
North Carolina elects its appellate judges in partisan elections; the party shown for each justice is the party they last ran under. Party is displayed as a fact and is never used in any calculation.
Every figure on this site traces back to the opinion it came from. If you find an error, write to [contact email] and we will correct the record and note the change.