NC Court of Appeals Judge, Seat 3

NOTE: You may vote for one. Candidates are presented below in the order they appear on your ballot. All of my research sources and links for these candidates are presented after and below the candidate profiles.

Reason for my Endorsement:

Collins identifies U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as the justice who most closely reflects his judicial philosophy. Asked whether judges may properly consider present-day public opinion or the consequences of a decision when interpreting a statute or constitutional provision, Collins answered simply: “No.” Walczyk says that constitutional principles sometimes have to be applied to circumstances the people who originally wrote them could never have anticipated. She has been endorsed by the NC Association of Educators, the NC State AFL-CIO, and Equality NC PAC, among many other progressive organizations.

CRAIG COLLINS (Republican)

Craig Collins campaign website

Collins is a Gaston County Superior Court judge whose legal career has moved through nearly every level of North Carolina’s trial courts. He graduated from the University of Pittsburgh and Villanova University School of Law. Collins spent nine years as an assistant district attorney in Gaston County, nine years in private practice, and nine years as a District Court judge. He was elected to Superior Court in 2024. That gives Collins extensive trial court experience, although considerably less direct appellate experience than some candidates for the Court of Appeals.

Before becoming a judge, Collins also spent several years in Republican Party leadership. He chaired the Gaston County Republican Party from 2011 to 2013 and the Republican Party’s 10th Congressional District organization from 2013 to 2015. In 2015, he ran for chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party, with endorsements from then-Gov. Pat McCrory, House Speaker Tim Moore, Senate leader Phil Berger and U.S. Senators Richard Burr and Thom Tillis. After Collins lost that race, McCrory appointed him to a vacant District Court judgeship the following year. Collins’s years in Republican Party leadership do not tell us how he has ruled as a judge. Nor does previous political activity establish that a judge will decide cases according to partisan interests. But Collins himself makes the distinction between politics and judging central to his campaign. He says he will not rewrite the Constitution to advance his own political agenda and argues that courts must stay out of policymaking.

WHAT KIND OF JUDGE WOULD COLLINS BE?

Collins describes himself as a “Constitutional Conservative.” He says the Constitution should be followed as written and that constitutional documents do not change their meaning unless they are amended. When constitutional or statutory language is clear, Collins says a judge should go no further: “The text speaks for itself.” When the language is ambiguous or silent, he says judges should look to the intent of its authors rather than their own policy preferences. Collins identifies U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as the justice who most closely reflects his judicial philosophy.

He also takes a particularly firm position on whether contemporary circumstances should be considered in judicial interpretations. Asked whether judges may properly consider present-day public opinion or the consequences of a decision when interpreting a statute or constitutional provision, Collins answered simply: “No.” Collins says judicial restraint is necessary to preserve the constitutional role of courts. Courts decide whether laws are constitutional. They should not make policy themselves. Asked about regulation of artificial intelligence, for example, Collins said those policy decisions belong in the legislative process: “The Court should not involve itself in policy.” He also says precedent is not absolute. If an earlier court’s interpretation was clearly erroneous and had no basis in the law, Collins believes courts have an obligation to correct the error.

Taken together, those answers describe a fairly specific approach to judging: constitutional text retains its meaning; clear language controls; ambiguity may require looking to the intent of those who wrote the provision; contemporary public opinion and practical consequences should not affect interpretation; and policymaking belongs to elected lawmakers rather than judges.

FOLLOWING ESTABLISHED LAW

In In re L.D.C. & K.J.C., Collins terminated a father’s parental rights after finding that the father had abandoned his children. Termination of parental rights is one of the most consequential actions a court can take. North Carolina law therefore requires the facts supporting termination to be established by clear, cogent and convincing evidence. The Court of Appeals concluded that Collins’s order did not state that he had applied that required evidentiary standard. But there was also another problem. To terminate parental rights for abandonment, the abandonment must be willful. Collins’s order contained no finding about whether the father’s abandonment was willful.

The Court of Appeals therefore vacated the termination order and sent the case back to Collins for reconsideration and additional findings. The appellate court did not conclude that the evidence could not support termination of the father’s parental rights. In fact, it said the record contained evidence from which the required findings potentially could be made. The problem was that Collins’s written order did not demonstrate that the required evidentiary standard had been applied or make the necessary finding on willfulness.

COLLINS’S PRINCIPLES

Collins argues that judges should follow established law rather than make it. He describes himself as a judge whose role is sharply limited — follow the constitutional text, apply established law, leave policymaking to elected officials and resist the temptation to reshape law according to contemporary preferences or consequences. Unlike a candidate coming directly from political life, Collins also has nearly eleven years on the bench against which that philosophy can be considered. His earlier career as a Republican Party leader and his current description of himself as a “Constitutional Conservative” tells us something about the principles he says he brings to judging.

ENDORSEMENTS: None located/verified.

Christine Marie Walczyk (Democrat)

Campaign website: judgechristine.org

WHO IS CHRISTINE MARIE WALCZYK?

Before becoming a judge, Walczyk practiced law in Raleigh for more than a decade. Her work included representing small businesses, indigent criminal defendants and juveniles. She earned an undergraduate degree in management and finance from Boston College and her law degree from the University of North Carolina. Walczyk has spent most of her legal career on the bench. She has served as a Wake County District Court judge since 2007, including years as the county’s lead Family Court judge. She now serves as lead judge in General Civil Court.

District Court judges spend their days much closer to ordinary people than appellate judges do. They hear the witnesses, evaluate evidence and make decisions involving families, children, criminal charges, money and other disputes that directly affect the people standing before them. Walczyk has been doing that work for nearly nineteen years.

WHAT KIND OF JUDGE WOULD WALCZYK BE?

Walczyk says judges should be independent of both politics and public pressure. She argues that judges are not legislators or advocates. Legislatures make policy and pass laws while courts resolve disputes, interpret the law and protect constitutional and statutory rights. When asked about her own method of interpreting the law, Walczyk resists familiar labels. She does not describe herself as either a “textualist” or a “living document” judge. Instead, she says she considers the words of a law, their purpose and their practical consequences, while remaining guided by judicial restraint and precedent. “I believe in precedent,” she says.

For Walczyk, precedent provides stability and predictability. People need to know what the law is, and courts should not continually reconsider settled questions simply because the membership or political control of a court changes. But Walczyk does not believe that stability means constitutional law can never change….

WHEN SHOULD LAW CHANGE?

Walczyk argues that constitutional principles sometimes have to be applied to circumstances the people who originally wrote them could never have anticipated. Her example is the Fourth Amendment, which protects people against unreasonable searches and seizures. The Framers could not have imagined AirTags, drones or other modern technologies capable of tracking or observing people in ways that did not exist when the Constitution was written. Walczyk says that in a case involving those technologies, simply asking what the Framers specifically contemplated would not answer the constitutional question.

Judges still have to decide how the Fourth Amendment applies. “We really have to apply the law to our current situations and our real world issues,” she says. But she says she is a “true believer in judicial restraint” and argues that courts should not repeatedly reopen settled decisions merely because different judges now control the court. At the same time, she points to cases such as Brown v. Board of Education, which overturned the constitutional acceptance of racial segregation established under Plessy v. Ferguson, and Loving v. Virginia, which struck down laws prohibiting interracial marriage, as examples of circumstances in which existing law could not remain frozen in place.

PRECEDENT MEETS THE TRIAL COURT

Walczyk’s own judicial record contains an interesting test of her emphasis on precedent and appellate authority, and it came in a child-custody dispute called Mastny v. Mastny.

In 2015, Walczyk modified an existing custody arrangement between two parents. The father appealed. In 2017, the North Carolina Court of Appeals reversed portions of Walczyk’s order. The appellate court said the order did not contain adequate findings connecting the changed circumstances in the family to the welfare of the child and explaining why modification of the existing custody arrangement was in the child’s best interest. The Court of Appeals sent the case back to Walczyk with instructions to reconsider those questions and make the necessary findings. Once the case was back in front of the lower court, Walczyk did not hear new evidence. She revised and added findings but left essentially the same custody arrangement in place.

The father appealed again. This time the Court of Appeals was considerably more pointed. In a unanimous 2018 decision, the court concluded that Walczyk had failed to follow its earlier mandate. It said the trial court had “merely rearranged and reworded” its previous order and that some of the revised findings were unsupported by the evidence. The Court of Appeals reversed the order again.

WALCZYK’S PRINCIPLES

Walczyk presents herself as a judge who places considerable importance on judicial independence, restraint, precedent and stability. But her understanding of restraint is not the same as freezing constitutional interpretation at the moment a constitutional provision was written. She argues that judges must begin with the law and remain constrained by precedent, while at the same time still applying constitutional principles to technologies and circumstances that earlier generations could not have imagined. Her AirTag and drone example makes the distinction concrete. The Fourth Amendment has not changed. The world in which judges must apply it has.