North Carolina Supreme Court Throws Out Decades-Old Right-to-Education Case

The North Carolina Supreme Court ended this month three decades of litigation involving funding the state’s public education system. Although the opinion, part of the well-known Leandro group of cases, was ostensibly decided on technical grounds, it’s clear that the state’s courts will not enforce the North Carolina Constitution’s commitment to public education enshrined in the Declaration of Rights for the foreseeable future.

Leandro began in 1994. The original plaintiffs were students and their parents in five counties, as well as the boards of education for those counties. They challenged the constitutionality of North Carolina’s school financing system. After some back-and-forth about whether to dismiss the complaint for failure to state a claim, the North Carolina Supreme Court in 1997 that the North Carolina Constitution protected a right to a “sound basic education.” It provided guidelines, such as students’ performance on standardized tests and the level of school funding, to determine whether an education was constitutionally adequate. The court also rejected the argument that the North Carolina Constitution required students across different districts to receive equal educational opportunities. It sent the case back to lower courts to try the claims. 

Subsequent proceedings established that while many aspects of North Carolina’s educational system were constitutional, it nonetheless deprived many at-risk students of a constitutionally adequate education. Over the next decade, a trial court in Hoke County, in the south-central part of the state, developed an extensive evidentiary record showing persistent, systemic deficiencies in educational outcomes, teacher quality, and resources. That court repeatedly deferred to the political branches to craft remedies, but the governor and legislature failed to take satisfactory steps. Eventually, the state of North Carolina and the remaining plaintiffs agreed to a remedial plan obligating the state to increase funding for education between 2021 and 2028. However, the state’s legislature, called the General Assembly, did not provide the funds.

In a 4–3 decision, the North Carolina Supreme Court in 2022 instructed the trial court to calculate how much additional money the state needed to provide in light of recent budgetary developments and ordered state leaders to fund the first years of the remedial plan.

In 2023, the trial court found that $677.8 million was needed to ensure North Carolina met its constitutional obligation to provide an adequate education. It declined to order lawmakers to actually provide the necessary funds, however, because of a writ of prohibition from the North Carolina Court of Appeals. (Writs of prohibition are a way for higher courts to prevent lower courts from taking certain actions in a case.)

The 2022 midterm elections occurred after the North Carolina Supreme Court’s decision but before the lower court issued its order, and the election resulted in the North Carolina Supreme Court’s composition changing from majority Democrat to majority Republican. The General Assembly appealed the trial court’s order, claiming that it lacked subject matter jurisdiction to enter it. Earlier this month, the North Carolina Supreme Court agreed, in a decision now styled Hoke County Board of Education v. State of North Carolina. Chief Justice Newby — who joined a vigorous dissent from the court’s 2022 opinion — wrote for the majority.

The majority dismissed the entire Leandro action with prejudice because, it said, the parties had not taken the proper steps to invoke the court’s subject matter jurisdiction to issue the orders it did during later stages of the litigation. The court gave two reasons for this holding. First, it cited a statute providing that “No order or judgment shall be entered [which] finds that an act of the General Assembly is facially invalid on the basis that the act violates the North Carolina Constitution or federal law, except by a three-judge panel of the Superior Court of Wake County.” Wake County is located in central North Carolina and encompasses the state capital, Raleigh. The law further required that such challenges filed outside Wake County be transferred to Wake County. Since the Hoke County Superior Court made the order, it therefore lacked jurisdiction under this provision, the court said.

Second, the court held that a court’s subject matter jurisdiction is limited to the specific issues and relief sought in a complaint. By 2017, the court said, the facts and issues had evolved such that the complaints filed before that date did not properly invoke jurisdiction over the case going forward. The court noted that the original plaintiffs — who filed their complaint in 1994 — had only raised as-applied challenges to North Carolina’s educational system. In the decades that followed, the court asserted, the case transformed into one making a facial challenge. It further stressed that North Carolina had made many changes to its educational system over the years, such that it was meaningfully different from the educational system the original plaintiffs challenged.

A charitable reading of the opinion is that this case — which has stretched over decades, seen the original plaintiffs leave school, and involved the intervention and departure of many parties — is now an odd vehicle to challenge the constitutionality of North Carolina’s educational system. Justice Richard Dietz’s dissent, while arguing that there was subject matter jurisdiction, acknowledged the case’s awkward procedural evolution.

Nonetheless, nothing in the text of North Carolina’s constitution or civil procedure statutes imposes the procedural subject matter jurisdiction requirements the court applied. Let’s start with the court’s analysis of the statute requiring challenges to the General Assembly’s acts to be filed in Wake County. While holding that a failure to comply was a fatal subject matter jurisdiction defect, the court also described Wake County as “the exclusive venue for facial constitutional challenges raised.” Venue statutes are about where, geographically, within a particular court system, litigation should take place. By contrast, subject matter jurisdiction asks whether the court system has the authority to hear particular types of claims. While parties cannot waive subject matter jurisdiction objections, they can waive venue objections by failing to timely raise them. This difference illustrates that venue and subject matter jurisdiction are not interchangeable concepts. The court erred in conflating them.

Equally perplexing is the holding that subject matter jurisdiction was lacking because, by 2017, the facts, issues raised, and relief sought were too different from the original complaints, and no amended complaint properly addressing the new landscape had been filed. The majority claimed that its analysis “corresponds to principles of due process and fundamental fairness” because “fundamental fairness requires a complaining party to notify the adverse party of the nature of the alleged wrong and the relief sought.” This is typically a consideration invoked in the context of motions to dismiss a complaint for failure to state a claim or motions for more definite statement — and might indeed be grounds to dismiss or require a party to submit an amended complaint. But it is not grounds to say that the court lacks subject matter jurisdiction to dismiss a complaint or to require an amended complaint. To bolster its approach to subject matter jurisdiction, the majority cited language from a handful of prior decisions, such as a North Carolina Court of Appeals case that said, in passing, that there is subject matter jurisdiction only over claims “presented in the form of a proper pleading.” However, in that case, the Court of Appeals held that a lower court lacked subject matter jurisdiction to issue orders to a sheriff’s department when no lawsuit was ever filed.

Finally, the decision to dismiss the case with prejudice for lack of subject matter jurisdiction was mystifying, as the dissents pointed out. Dismissal with prejudice prevents plaintiffs from refiling a lawsuit and is generally accompanied by a ruling on the merits of a claim. Lack of subject matter jurisdiction, especially on the technical grounds enumerated here, is the classic example of a court not ruling on the merits of a claim.

The court ended with a warning that, in its view, the North Carolina Constitution “did not vest the judicial branch with the power to resolve policy disputes between the other branches of government or to set education policy.” This observation is premised on understandable concerns about relative institutional competence to address education. Legislators have greater flexibility and resources to make good educational policy than judges do. Of course, that offers limited comfort because North Carolina is still the only state without a budget. It also currently ranks second-to-last among states for funding per pupil.

Students should expect that courts will not enforce the North Carolina Constitution’s right to a sound basic education for the foreseeable future. However, all hope is not lost. In fact, the decision presents those passionate about public education with new opportunities to improve the system and claim a role in constitutional rights enforcement. North Carolina enshrined a right to public education for the first time in its 1868 constitution. With slavery abolished only a few years before, and with recent experience of so many North Carolinians denied an education, delegates made a special appeal for ratification. They asked voters to consider that:

All may see the difference between the success in life of the educated and uneducated man, yet as often as not, the uneducated man has been gifted with the greater degree of intellectual power; the cause of his ill success is that it has not been developed. We propose to “level upwards,” to give to every child, as far as the State can, an opportunity to develop to the fullest extent, all his intellectual gifts. So noble an effort needs no vindication.

We have become too accustomed to leaving constitutional interpretation and constitutional rights enforcement to judges. But legislators who make appropriations decisions also swear oaths to uphold the state constitution. North Carolina voters should insist that their legislators take this oath seriously and treat public education as the core constitutional commitment that it is. Constitutions do not just provide rules judges apply to decide cases. They also communicate a society’s dreams. Perhaps instead of asking what the minimum level of school funding is to pass muster with courts, legislators can imagine what an education system would look like that truly lived up to the vision of the 1868 constitution’s drafters.

Marcus Gadson is an associate professor of law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Suggested Citation: Marcus Gadson, North Carolina Supreme Court Throws Out Decades-Old Right-to-Education Case, Sᴛᴀᴛᴇ Cᴏᴜʀᴛ Rᴇᴘᴏʀᴛ (April 13, 2026), https://statecourtreport.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/north-carolina-supreme-court-throws-out-decades-old-right-education-case