Anita Sue Earls

Current office and 2026 campaign

Anita Earls is the Democratic incumbent Associate Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, Seat 1, seeking re-election in the November 3, 2026 general election ¹. She has served on the court since January 3, 2019, after defeating Republican incumbent Justice Barbara Jackson in a three-candidate 2018 election (49.56% to 34.07%, with Christopher Anglin drawing 16.37%) ¹. Earls announced her campaign for re-election on October 22, 2024 ¹. On January 6, 2026, she disclosed that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer in late 2025, describing it as early-stage with a positive prognosis, and said she would continue her re-election campaign ¹.

Background and education

Earls was born Anita Sue Brooks on February 20, 1960, in Seattle, Washington, and was adopted; her parents had relocated to Washington state because Missouri banned interracial marriage at the time ¹. She graduated from Williams College, where she majored in political economy and philosophy, and later earned her J.D. from Yale Law School ¹.

Career

Earls began her legal career in 1988 at the Charlotte civil-rights firm Ferguson, Stein, Watt, Wallas, Adkins & Gresham, practicing civil rights litigation ¹. In 1998, President Bill Clinton appointed her Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice ¹. She later directed the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights' voting rights project (2000-2003) and the University of North Carolina Center for Civil Rights' advocacy work (2003-2007) ¹. In 2007 she founded the Southern Coalition for Social Justice in Durham, serving as its founding executive director until stepping down in 2017 to run for the Supreme Court ¹. She has also taught at Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Maryland ¹. While at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, Earls served as lead plaintiffs' attorney in North Carolina v. Covington, in which the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed in 2017 that 28 of North Carolina's state house and senate districts were unconstitutional racial gerrymanders ¹.

Office history

Earls has served as Associate Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court since January 3, 2019, succeeding Barbara Jackson ¹. On June 9, 2020, Governor Roy Cooper appointed her co-chair of North Carolina's Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice, convened after the murder of George Floyd ¹.

Documented disputes and controversies

On August 29, 2023, Earls filed a federal lawsuit (Earls v. North Carolina Judicial Standards Commission, U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina, No. 23-cv-00734) alleging that the state's judicial ethics commission opened an investigation into her that improperly targeted her First Amendment-protected criticism of a lack of diversity on the state's courts, stemming from a Law360 interview in which she discussed potential "implicit biases" among colleagues and the disbanding of a commission examining racial and gender inequality in the judiciary ¹. In a 2019 campaign speech, Chief Justice Paul Newby, who appoints six of the Commission's fourteen members, referred to Earls by saying "In 2018, the Left put $1.5 million to get their 'AOC' person on the court" ¹.

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