Until recently, a single judge sitting on a panel of the North Carolina Court of Appeals could tee up an issue for the Supreme Court of North Carolina simply by filing a dissenting opinion. N.C. Gen. Stat. § 7A-30(2) allowed the losing party to notice appeal based solely on that dissent.
That all went away with the passage of the 2023 budget bill (S.L. 2023-134), which eliminated dissent-based appeals by striking N.C. Gen. Stat. § 7A-30(2). Well, sort of. The new version of the statute “applies to appellate cases filed with the Court of Appeals on or after” 3 October 2023. No one knows for sure what it means for an “appellate case” to be “filed with the Court of Appeals,” although the Supreme Court may take a lenient approach, allowing for dissent-based appeals in cases where the notice of appeal was filed in the trial tribunal before 3 October 2023.
Even still, most of the opinions coming out now should be in cases where the notice of appeal was filed after 3 October 2023. By way of example, it looks like 19 of the 30 opinions released on 16 July 2025 were filed after the cutoff, with 11 of the 30 opinions arising in cases where the notice of appeal was filed before 3 October 2023.
It would be reasonable, then, to hypothesize that our Court of Appeals judges would be writing fewer dissents now, under a theory that one of the motivating factors for writing a separate dissenting opinion was the prospect of automatic review in the Supreme Court.
Yet, the data do not support that hypothesis:
In the graph, I’ve plotted the percentage of opinions issued by the North Carolina Court of Appeals that are accompanied by at least one dissenting opinion as a function of the opinion release date, on a six-month rolling average to smooth out the noise. If the Court had undergone a culture shift away from dissents during the nearly two-year period after the 3 October 2023 cutoff, we would expect to see the blue line go down. But if anything, it is slightly rising.
Of course, there are a variety of possible explanations. Perhaps more time is needed before the rate of dissents goes down. Or, perhaps judges who have been writing dissents for years already have their habits set.
Or maybe the hypothesis is wrong, and judges generally didn’t write dissenting opinions just so they could trigger the automatic right of appeal. Instead, they dissent now for the same reason they always did: they have a material disagreement on an issue that matters.
[View source.]
