NC Superior Court Judge, District 35, Seat 1

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 this candidate are presented at the end of his campaign profile.

Reason for my Endorsement:

I call around to attorneys and others that I know to get a “feel” on a lot of these judge races. Most of those I consulted told me they thought Rupp does a good job. One told me he sometimes became “aggravated” with attorneys and advocates and sometimes attempts to overreach the boundaries of his office. But I don’t have any evidence of that other than what I present below. Rupp is running unopposed for Superior Court Judge in District 35. He is currently a District Court judge, a job he has held since 2022. And how he got there is worth noting. He was appointed by Governor Cooper. I can’t find anything troubling about him. You’re going to get him. Here’s who you’re getting.

WHO IS MATT RUPP?

Rupp is a Boone native and Watauga High School graduate. He graduated from Notre Dame and Duke Law School. His résumé includes Republican political work. Before returning to North Carolina, he worked in Washington, including service on congressional committees and in federal inspector-general offices. His legal career has included private practice and more than a decade as a prosecutor, first in Mecklenburg County and later here in the mountains.

Rupp is currently a District Court judge, a job he has held since 2022. Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper appointed Republican Matthew Rupp to the District Court bench in June 2022 following the retirement of Judge Larry Leake. Rupp subsequently won election to the seat. Before Cooper put him on the bench, Rupp had also served as president of the Watauga County Bar Association.

I tried to find out more about the Cooper appointment, ie: who recommended Rupp, whether there was a local bar recommendation, who else was considered, and why a Democratic governor chose this particular Republican. I couldn’t find enough reliable public information to answer those questions.

SO WHAT KIND OF JUDGE HAS RUPP BEEN?

This is where things get interesting. I went looking for a pattern in Rupp’s judicial decisions. I didn’t find an obvious ideological one. The relatively small portion of his work that has reached the appellate courts show a judge who has ruled for DSS and against DSS, terminated parental rights, dismissed neglect allegations and reached different conclusions about different children living in the same household.

What does emerge is that Rupp appears willing to make distinctions, sometimes very fine ones, about whether the evidence before him actually satisfies the particular legal standard he is being asked to apply. One case illustrates that particularly well.

TWO CHILDREN. SAME HOUSE. DIFFERENT RULINGS.

In a Watauga County DSS case involving two children living in the same household, the evidence included alcoholism, arguments between the parents, mental-health problems involving an older child, clutter and household chemicals. Rupp did not treat all of that as a single package and declare the household either safe or unsafe. He adjudicated the older child neglected. But he dismissed DSS’s neglect and dependency allegations concerning the younger child, who was about a year old.

Why? Because he concluded DSS hadn’t presented clear, cogent and convincing evidence connecting many of the troubling conditions in the home to neglect or dependency of that particular child. Clutter wasn’t enough without evidence that it endangered the child. Household cleaning products weren’t enough without evidence the child could access them or that they presented a danger. The father’s alcoholism wasn’t enough without evidence showing how it affected that child. Arguments between the parents weren’t enough without evidence that the child was present for them or affected by them.

DSS appealed. The three-judge panel was bipartisan, two Republicans and one Democrat, and all three agreed. The North Carolina Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal. In other cases, Rupp has terminated parental rights, and those decisions have survived appellate review. What it does show is a judge unwilling, at least in this case, to substitute a generally troubled household for evidence satisfying the law as to a particular child.

AND HE HAS BEEN WRONG TOO

There are also appellate decisions in which Rupp was reversed. In one Watauga juvenile case, DSS filed neglect petitions involving two children. After hearing the evidence, the District Court dismissed the petitions. DSS asked the court to reconsider. Rupp subsequently entered orders adjudicating the children neglected and removing them from their parents. The parents appealed.

The North Carolina Court of Appeals held that the court no longer had jurisdiction to do what Rupp had done. Once the petitions had been dismissed, jurisdiction under the applicable juvenile statutes had ended. The later orders were void. And that’s not a minor disagreement about how Rupp weighed the evidence. It was a legal error concerning the court’s authority to act, and the Court of Appeals vacated the later orders. And for whatever it’s worth in an era of partisan judicial elections, the three Court of Appeals judges who unanimously reversed Rupp were Republicans too.

A separate 2026 juvenile delinquency appeal involved a Watauga High School student whom Rupp adjudicated delinquent for disorderly conduct after an angry confrontation with school administrators. The Court of Appeals reversed, holding that the evidence was insufficient to show the substantial disruption required by the disorderly-conduct statute. The court also vacated the related probation review order and sent that issue back for a new hearing. That case matters for a different reason: it is not a DSS case. It gives us another window into Rupp’s judging and another example of an appellate court concluding that the evidence before him did not satisfy the legal standard.

SO WHAT DOES RUPP’S RECORD TELL US?

Not as much as I would like.

District Court judges decide thousands of matters that never produce published appellate opinions. Juvenile cases are particularly difficult to examine because of confidentiality restrictions. The cases that reach an appellate court are also a self-selected group. Somebody believed something had gone wrong badly enough to appeal. The bottomline is that as far as I can tell the appellate record does not reveal Rupp as a judge mechanically siding with government agencies, parents, prosecutors or defendants. It shows somebody making case-specific decisions. Sometimes DSS proves its case before him. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes he has imposed the remedy of terminating parental rights. And sometimes an appellate court has told him he got the law wrong.

DISTRICT COURT TO SUPERIOR COURT

Rupp is now seeking a different judicial job. District Court handles, among other things, family and juvenile matters, misdemeanors and civil cases involving $25,000 or less. Superior Court handles felony criminal cases, civil cases involving more than $25,000 and misdemeanor appeals from District Court. Superior Court judges also rotate among districts within their judicial divisions rather than remaining permanently in their home district.

So Rupp is not simply asking voters to give him another term doing the same job. He is seeking a court with substantially different responsibilities. There is no opposing candidate on your ballot. So this isn’t one of those Pam’s Picks races where I’m going to compare two people competing for the same job. You’re going to get Matthew Rupp.