Sarah Stevens Says Judges Called ‘Frequently’ With Requests to Change Laws

In September 2025, at a Republican women’s club dinner in the small mountain community of Jefferson, the chair of a state House judiciary committee recounted how she came to run for a seat on North Carolina’s highest court.

“I have a great working relationship with Justice Barringer, who I call Tamara,” Sarah Stevens said, according to a video of the speech The Assembly obtained. “So I get a call from she and the chief justice and a couple of people saying: ‘We really need you to run for the Supreme Court.’”

It wasn’t the first time Stevens had answered the state justices’ call. The veteran legislator also told the attendees of the Ashe County Republican Women’s Club Sandra Day O’Connor Dinner that she “frequently” received calls from judges and justices in the years leading up to the 2022 election, which flipped the state’s highest court to Republicans’ advantage.

“Not even just you,” Stevens said, looking toward Barringer, who sat in a folding chair at a table set with American flag napkins. The two women overlapped as lawmakers when Barringer, a state Supreme Court justice since 2021, served in the state Senate from 2013 to 2018. Stevens was first elected to the state House in 2008, serving in party leadership and chairing the chamber’s election law committee and a judiciary committee before she resigned in June. 

Stevens said jurists sometimes contacted her after a contentious court decision. “This is what they’ve ruled, we’ve got to get past it, so can we go back here to rewrite the law?” Stevens said they asked. (Barringer’s husband and legal counsel, Brent Barringer, said, “No such call was ever made by Justice Barringer on a legislative issue or topic.”)

Legal experts The Assembly contacted had varied opinions on whether it was appropriate for sitting judges to lobby lawmakers. None of them said it was wrong for Stevens to take the calls. But her description of those conversations demonstrates how judicial practices are changing in state courts around the country.

The judicial system is entering a “brave new world” where norms in “campaign spending, campaign conduct, disqualification standards, and the stability of substantive law have been kicked to the curb,” Indiana University professor Charles Geyh, a national expert on judicial ethics, wrote in a law review article earlier this year. 

North Carolina’s high court, under the leadership of Chief Justice Paul Newby, has been at the vanguard. Reportedly at Newby’s urging, the Republican-led General Assembly made state Supreme Court races partisan and got rid of public financing about a decade ago. Since then, as the U.S. Supreme Court kicked high-profile political matters like abortion and gerrymandering to state courts, judicial races have been flooded with money from interest groups.

Candidates and sitting judges are required under the state Code of Judicial Conduct to act “in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary.” But they have increasingly flirted with those boundaries. Stevens’ description of her calls shows jurists dabbling in politics outside campaign season, as well.

“What we’re dealing with here is this highly unusual situation in which judges are taking off their robes and are taking on the role of a cheerleader for a cause,” Geyh told The Assembly. “That ends up getting you into this situation where you start wondering: To what extent is the judge who is doing that committed to impartiality, as opposed to committed to an agenda?” 

No Consensus

There’s a vigorous debate about appropriate bounds on judicial lobbying, partly because judges have expertise worth sharing. 

They are not “per se prohibited from pointing out to the legislature bad statutes simply because they wear the robe,” Wake Forest University law professor Ellen Murphy said. 

But calls to legislators recommending specific changes to the law could cross an ethical red line.

“Clearly, if there’s a case pending before the judge relating to that law, it’s problematic,” Murphy said. A call made after an opinion is published also could be problematic, she said, if “they are implying or promising to rule a certain way on the legislation if the legislation is passed.”

Geyh said it’s likely that “judges who are trying to defend going to legislators and basically saying, ‘Other members of the court have reached this result, and this is a bad thing, and you need to fix it,’” would point to Canon Four to justify their behavior. That part of the state Code of Judicial Conduct states that a judge “may participate in cultural or historical activities or engage in activities concerning the legal, economic, educational, or governmental system, or the administration of justice.” 

“The problem is that that specific provision is embedded in a larger context,” Geyh said. “You don’t get to do stuff that undermines public confidence in your integrity and impartiality.”

Four former justices The Assembly consulted had differing views on this type of lobbying.

Patricia Timmons-Goodson, who served the state as a district court judge, then on the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court between 1984 and 2012, said the idea of calling a legislator was “foreign to me.” She said, “During the time I came along, judges did not reach out to the legislature.”

She worried that “if a judge is comfortable enough going to legislators, talking about changes in policy, it allows for a relationship to build up that perhaps the legislator would be comfortable coming to the judge for something.” 

“I just think that the system works best when folks stay in their lane and do their job,” said Timmons-Goodson, who is registered as a Democrat.

Robin Hudson, who served on the Court of Appeals from 2001-2006, then on the Supreme Court from 2007-2022, said, “The only kind of lobbying that I heard about during the time I was on either court was that the chief justice or the chief judge would go down there [to the General Assembly] to talk about the budget.” 

“No legislator ever called me, and I never called a legislator about anything during my 22 years on the court,” said Hudson, a registered Democrat. She pointed to the provision in the state constitution separating the authorities of the judicial, executive, and legislative branches: “Monkeying around with the legislature just never seemed to me to be part of my job description.”

Bob Orr, a Court of Appeals judge (1986-1994) and Supreme Court justice (1995-2004), said phone calls like Stevens described were unusual. “But once a decision has been issued, it’s fair game,” said Orr, a Republican who later left the party.

Bob Hunter Jr., who served on the Supreme Court in 2014 and on the Court of Appeals for 10 years, agreed. “Any citizen, including judges and state officials, has a right to go to legislators and complain or inform them about issues,” Hunter said. He said he got calls from legislators who wanted him to interpret court rulings but told them he couldn’t shine much light beyond the written opinion because the court came to decisions collectively. If a legislator who was a friend recommended something unconstitutional, Hunter said, he thought it was OK to let them know that wasn’t a good idea.

He sympathized with judges wanting to make sure that lawmakers understand their rulings. “I hate to say this about the intelligence level of some of our legislators, but I doubt they read judicial opinions,” said Hunter, a registered Republican. “Many of them, I don’t even know that they can read, and they may not be able to understand what they read. 

“People get emotional about politics, and they want to express themselves, and they can do that under the state constitution,” he continued.

Hunter recalled once making his own phone call after hearing a case on the Court of Appeals. He thought his colleagues on the three-judge panel made a serious mistake in upholding a murder conviction that relied heavily on a new DNA-analysis technique. 

After the decision and his written dissent were published, “I called up the Innocence Commission and told them I wanted them to look into this case because this man was innocent,” Hunter said. Seven years later, that man’s conviction was overturned.

“It’s the proudest moment of my life,” Hunter said. “I don’t know that it was ethical or not, but it was the right thing to do.”

Task Force Tensions

In the speech she delivered in Jefferson, Stevens expressed no disapproval of the judges and justices who called her.

She did not respond to questions from The Assembly aimed at understanding the content and frequency of the calls, why they were directed to her, and how she thinks about judicial lobbying, both as a former legislator and a potential jurist.

State Rep. Deb Butler, the top Democrat on the judiciary committee Stevens chaired until this summer, said she has never gotten a call from a justice. The only calls she said she received from a judge were in response to her own requests for technical information.

“I know Anita Earls well,” Butler said, referring to the incumbent Democrat on the Supreme Court Stevens is challenging. “She does not call me and suggest that certain laws be passed—never once.” 

Butler acknowledged that the lack of calls may have to do with being a member of the minority party. “Maybe if I’m in the majority someday,” she said, “they’ll try.” 

Stevens has repeatedly condemned another form of judicial lobbying. 

Earls, one of two Democrats on the seven-member court, co-chaired the Task Force on Racial Equity in Criminal Justice that Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper established in 2020 amid the Black Lives Matter protests that followed George Floyd’s murder. 

In Jefferson, Stevens called the task force’s report “a very, very lengthy opinion where we should do away with a lot of drug offenses, and we shouldn’t put people in jail for drugs, and we should let them out.” She later sharpened her attack, arguing that Earls’ participation was unethical. 

Stevens told WUNC last month that she took issue not only with the task force’s recommendations on bail and school resource officers but also with Earls serving on a group the executive branch convened. Stevens said that Newby told her he’d “suggested that she might not do that because that’s crossing branches,” but that Earls chose to participate anyway.

Earls has disputed that there was any problem with her serving on the task force, whose report includes 125 wide-ranging recommendations. She told WUNC that advocacy for a fair and equitable system is “part of our responsibility” laid out in the Code of Judicial Conduct.

Over the years, many judges and justices have participated in discussions the other two branches have convened, including the Governor’s Crime Commission and the General Assembly’s Courts Commission, which Stevens once chaired.

“There’s no violation of the Code of Judicial Conduct in serving on the task force,” said Murphy, the Wake Forest professor. “There may be limits on what a judge should say about the work of the task force, but that would require a fact-specific analysis of something that a judge has said.” 

Geyh agreed: “The idea that a judge is somehow behaving in a way that is less than impartial or is not committed to the integrity of the court system by simply showing up and having conversations” on a task force about underrepresentation of Black people in the court system, or racial or gender bias, is “problematic.”

“Now, if the task force is clearly a partisan organization or clearly has an ideological or partisan ax to grind, well, that’s a different conversation,” he said.

Change Agents

In her time in the legislature, Stevens played a key role in ushering in what Geyh called the “brave new world” in North Carolina’s courts.

She sponsored several bills giving more authority over judicial discipline and appointments to the General Assembly and the chief justice—tweaks Democrats decried as serving partisan interests.

One particularly dramatic episode centered on a 2017 bill Stevens sponsored that sought to shrink the Court of Appeals from 15 judges to 12. 

Critics interpreted the bill as an effort to prevent then-Gov. Cooper from appointing judges of his party when some members of that court hit the mandatory retirement age. The bill also substantially increased the caseload of the state Supreme Court by transferring some cases from the Court of Appeals, which some suspected was part of a larger plan to pack the high court. 

Stevens justified the change on administrative grounds, but she and a co-sponsor both noted in committee hearings that the affected courts had not been asked to weigh in. Her estimate of the number of cases transferred was off by a factor of five. Those changes were later reversed.

A major pillar of the court’s claim to impartiality is that judges recuse themselves when they have a conflict of interest. But there are signs that bulwark is cracking. Academic research and journalistic reporting suggest that recusals happen less often than they should.

North Carolina’s Supreme Court issued an order clarifying how recusals and disqualifications should be handled in the appellate courts in 2021, the year Newby became chief justice. It allowed justices to make their own determination on whether to sit out a case or turn the decision over to their colleagues for a majority vote. Since then, the justices’ recusal decisions have often made news.

Most of the time, justices do make their own determination. But in 2024, Justice Phil Berger Jr., son of the Senate leader, chose to let his colleagues decide whether he should rule on two cases in which his father was a defendant. The court’s vote fell along party lines: Republican justices concluded that he didn’t need to recuse himself because the senior Berger was involved only in an official capacity rather than a personal one.

Barringer, the only former lawmaker on the court, has declined to recuse herself when legislation she voted on has come up. In a 2022 order, she wrote that she was “following a strong and firmly rooted tradition” in doing so: “I am following the precedent established by the 51 of my 100 predecessor Justices who first served in the legislature and later went on to fairly and impartially judge various statutes that were passed or amended during their legislative tenure before they joined the North Carolina Supreme Court.”

Stevens and Earls have both raised concerns about the other’s willingness to step aside in cases where there is an actual or perceived conflict. 

Earls said Stevens is “seeking to grade her own homework” and review the constitutionality of laws she had a hand in passing. Stevens said Earls, who previously litigated voting rights cases as a civil rights attorney, should have recused herself in a voter ID case. Stevens has also said she does not think her legislative work on redistricting would require her to recuse herself if she lands a seat on the court.

Meanwhile, formal complaints about judicial behavior have been rising. Last year, North Carolina’s Judicial Standards Commission received 932—more than triple the number a decade ago. 

Both candidates were asked at a North Carolina Bar Association forum this summer what they would do to promote trust in the court system. 

Earls said she thought faith in the courts was waning because politicians attack decisions they don’t agree with “by delegitimizing the process and the justices and the court.” 

“The only thing that I know to do about it, at least in the role that I have,” she said, “is to continue to carry out this role with as much integrity as I possibly can, and to be out in community and talk with people about what their concerns are, and help them understand the judicial process, and help them understand what our court does and how we do it, and why we believe that it’s fair.”

Stevens argued for a policy solution. “Allowing people to get set free on cashless bond when there’s a serious crime, that is something Justice Earls has promoted,” Stevens said. She noted that she filed legislation in response. 

Disclosure: Brent Barringer, the husband of state Supreme Court Justice Tamara Barringer, is an investor in The Assembly.