Supreme Court on primary ballot, too

Published 12:00 am Friday, May 27, 2016

You’ll find some judges’ names on the June 7 primary ballot.

A legal challenge canceled a law that would have allowed N.C. Supreme Court Justice Robert Edmunds to seek re-election by an up-or-down vote. Now Edmunds and three others are running in a primary, with the top two vote-getters advancing to the fall election.

Candidates are:

• Robert H. Edmunds Jr., 67, is an associate justice on state Supreme Court, first elected in November 2000 and re-elected in 2008. Edmunds received his A.B. from Vassar College in 1971 and his J.D. from the University of North Carolina School of Law in 1975. Edmunds spent two years in the Navy. He was U.S. attorney for the Middle District from 1986 to 1998 and served on the Court of Appeals from 1999 to 2001.

• Sabra Jean Faires, 60, a Raleigh attorney, filed the lawsuit that successfully challenged Edmunds’ retention election and set the stage for the primary vote. She specializes in government law, specifically in the areas of administrative law, elections and political law, and taxation.  She graduated from Davidson College and the UNC School of Law. Before joining the Bailey Dixon law firm, she practiced law for over 30 years on behalf of the state in both the legislative and executive branches of government.

• Michael R. Morgan, 60, a Wake County Superior Court judge, is running on his experience as a judge for 21 years on the superior and district court levels He is a graduate of Duke University and the N.C. Central University School of Law. Gov. Jim Hunt appointed him as a district court judge in 1994, and he was elected to Superior Court in 2005. Earlier in his career, he was an assistant attorney general in the N.C. Department of Justice and an administrative law judge.

• Daniel Robertson of Advance is a Davie County attorney. He earned his undergraduate degree from UNC Chapel Hill in 1980 and received his law degree from the University of Mississippi School of Law. Robertson clerked for a number of federal judges. Beginning in 1988, he began working as an attorney in private practice in 1988 and formed his own law firm this year. He was general counsel to the Bank of the Carolinas from 2009 to 2015.

The race is considered non-partisan. Edmunds is Republican, Faires is unaffiliated, Morgan and Robertson are Democrats.