A Conversation with North Carolina Justice Allison Riggs

In November, the Brennan Center for Justice, State Court Report, and the Northwestern Law Review hosted a symposium dedicated to state constitutional law. Several state supreme court justices who participated in the program sat down with brief interviews with State Court Report, which we are publishing as a series.

North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs has served on the North Carolina Supreme Court since 2023. She was appointed by Gov. Roy Cooper (D), who had previously named her to the state’s Court of Appeals in 2022. Prior to serving on the bench, Riggs was a prominent civil rights lawyer focusing on voting rights. In 2024, Riggs’s election win to keep her seat on the state high court received national attention after her opponent refused to concede, despite multiple recounts confirming his loss, and tried to have legally cast votes throw out. It took six months and battles in both state and federal court for her race to be confirmed.

In her interview, Riggs spoke about the drawbacks of partisan judicial races, new challenges created by artificial intelligence (AI), and how she models the behavior she’d like to see on the bench.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

When you were in law school, what did you expect your legal career to look like?

I applied to law school thinking I’d be an environmental lawyer. I have a degree in microbiology and a master’s degree in the history of science, and it seemed like a natural progression for someone interested in the sciences. But by the end of law school, I knew I was going to focus on civil rights.

It wasn’t until I was practicing that I realized the significance of the temperament and character and values of the judges I was appearing before — and even more significantly, what that meant for my clients and how they understood the justice system. It was like, “Oh, that is another level at which I can use this degree to do some good someday!” But I didn’t have it on my bingo card for 2022. I got married in 2021 and thought I would just keep doing the job that I enjoyed doing and enjoy my personal life. I’ve campaigned with people who knew they wanted to be a judge from very early on; I had about 80 different iterations of what I wanted to be before I finally landed there.

What advice do you wish someone had given you when you were a law student?

I wish I’d been pressed harder to clerk. I spent a lot of time in law school doing direct client work with a clinic, helping people apply for clemency to have their civil rights restored in Florida. I enjoyed that client work so much that it was all I could think about. The idea of sitting quietly and doing a lot of research and writing was not particularly appealing to me at that stage in my life. But it was an opportunity I should have availed myself of before practice sweeps you up and you’re on a steep learning curve. That quiet time will never come back.

I was lucky that my practice early on was fairly generalist. That’s also something that clerking can give you — that sense of seeing a wide range of what the practice looks like. It helps you make better decisions that are better fits for you. It’s beneficial to you have that generalist experience in clerking, that quiet time early in your career to focus on learning the doctrine and thinking about how decisions are made.

What challenges do students face today that are different from your experience?

I can’t imagine what it’s like to go through law school with AI. It would feel intimidating to get an education in a time when it seems like a lot of information is being generated that way.

Also, folks who are graduating now feel like they’re entering an uncertain job market. I graduated in 2009, on the tail end of the recession. The legal job market had crashed. It didn’t think it was going to directly impact me, although it had such domino effects that there was no one who left school then who didn’t feel the impact. Obviously, student debt was bad then, but it’s worse now.

What do you enjoy about being a state court judge?

I am at a stage in life where I like sitting quietly and reading and thinking — it feels luxurious, especially coming off a campaign. I also really enjoy trying to model the behavior I wanted to see from people on the bench when I was litigating. We frequently have attorneys before us who are arguing for the first time. I was in their shoes not all that long ago, and I was front of judges who were gruff and unkind and unnecessarily brusque, and it didn’t have to be that way. It also didn’t build my client’s confidence. So, I smile at every person who steps up to the podium, even if I do look a little bit discordant compared to my colleagues.

The first time I argued in the U.S. Supreme Court, I stood up to the podium and I was a little nervous and Justice [Elena] Kagan gave me a gentle smile. It wasn’t inappropriate, it wasn’t over the top, but it was, in that moment, incredibly meaningful to me because I saw it as a non-verbal, “I see you. You’ve worked hard to get here. Make your best argument. I’m interested to hear what you have to say.” And that made me a better advocate in the moment. It stuck with me. I had ample experience by then, and yet it was a bit of a unique experience. And then you start to think, “Wait, why is this such a unique experienced?” So, getting to sit in those rarefied spaces, I can help make that change. When it comes to the folks who come before my court — no matter what their arguments are, no matter how I ultimately rule — I have the ability to convey through my words and my actions on the bench that I’m interested in what they have to say, that I know that they’ve worked hard to get there and that their clients have put a lot of faith in them to make this argument. It is part of what I want to see more of in the legal practice, so to be able to model it is rewarding and enjoyable.

What is something people might not know about your state constitution?

In the U.S. Constitution, you have the Bill of Rights appended to the end of the Constitution, whereas ours (and this isn’t uncommon), precedes the constitution. To me that matters — structurally, visually, in all the ways. Before we talk about the three branches of government, we talk about popular sovereignty and that power is in the hands of the people. That the guiding document begins with a recognition of the rights of people of the state is a way for me to remember why I’m here and why I am doing this. It’s the lens through which everything that comes after it is filtered.

What are opinions you’ve participated in that are the most memorable to you?

The first time I felt the full import of work that I was doing was while I was still a judge on the Court of Appeals. The North Carolina legislature had unanimously passed a statute to allow victims of child sex abuse to bring claims after the expiration of the statute of limitations, in the light of the understandable delayed disclosure of many victims. It’s a very politically charged issue. Parts of the bar were very opposed to it and parts were very in favor of it. I was on a panel and wrote a bipartisan decision upholding the Safe Child Act as a constitutional exercise of the legislature’s power in recognition of the unique circumstances of the childhood victims of these egregious practices and behaviors. I got to talk about the statutes of limitations and procedural hurdles and was really proud to do that. And it was unanimously upheld by the North Carolina Supreme Court.

Then, when I was on the supreme court, I wrote a dissent in a case where Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was seeking to take his name off the ballot in the 2024 election. It was, of course, an election law case. I had represented voters in voting rights litigation for so long, and my clients would have never succeeded in convincing a court to force a board of elections to incur millions of dollars to change the ballots and election procedures on the eve of an election — which was, essentially, what Kennedy was doing. My dissent is strongly worded because I felt I had a unique voice to describe the inconsistency of what my court did in ordering all these ballots to be reprinted at the cost of county boards of elections right before the election. I wanted folks to understand what an outlier that decision was. If different people receive a different measure of justice, it matters.

What are some challenges facing state courts?

For North Carolina, in particular, two things come to mind. One is the way we elect judges. Just having lived through that, it’s hard to reconcile with what we typically think of judges, which is that they are not your typical politicians. But the campaign finance issues and the partisan nature of these races — there’s always going to be something about that that’s a little bit off for me. I didn’t make the rules, and nobody asks me for policy advice, though I’d be willing to talk to any policymaker about my experience.

Regardless of their political affiliation, I think it ought to trouble everyone that partisan elections make it really hard to inspire faith and independence in the judiciary. People just see it as politics as usual. Plus, we are living in a time, certainly in North Carolina, when norms and traditions are eroding and our jurisprudence is changing rapidly in short time. That’s just really hard to navigate.

What is your response when people say courts are too politicized?

I remind people that these are decisions that the legislature gets to make. In North Carolina, we used to have nonpartisan judicial elections. We used to do public financing of judicial elections. But I play with the hand dealt to me. That’s the best that I can do. I serve all the people of North Carolina regardless of their registration or voting histories.

Erin Geiger Smith is a writer and editor at the Brennan Center for Justice.

Suggested Citation: Erin Geiger Smith, A Conversation with North Carolina Justice Allison Riggs, Sᴛᴀᴛᴇ Cᴏᴜʀᴛ Rᴇᴘᴏʀᴛ(Dec. 15, 2025), https://statecourtreport.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/conversation-north-carolina-justice-allison-riggs