At least 27 cases heard by the Supreme Court originated in the Middle District of North Carolina:
| Case | Holding |
| Funk v. United States, 290 U.S. 371 (1933) | The defendant’s conviction for violating Prohibition laws was vacated because the district court improperly excluded testimony by the defendant’s wife in his favor; overruling prior cases following common law rule prohibiting spousal testimony in federal criminal trials. |
| United States v. Chambers, 291 U.S. 217 (1934) | The defendant’s conviction for violating Prohibition laws before Prohibition’s repeal was vacated because the Twenty-First Amendment to the Constitution had repealed Congress’s power under the Eighteenth Amendment to prohibit the sale of alcoholic beverages. |
| Nye v. United States, 313 U.S. 33 (1941) | The defendants’ convictions for criminal contempt were vacated because the conduct at issue, while reprehensible and obstructing the administration of justice, did not occur in the presence of or near to the court, as required by the statute then in effect. |
| United States v. Durham Lumber Co., 363 U.S. 522 (1960) | A subcontractor’s mechanics lien had priority over a government tax lien because North Carolina law provided unpaid subcontractors with a direct statutory claim against building owners. |
| Scales v. United States, 367 U.S. 203 (1961) | The provisions in the Smith Act making it a crime to knowingly be a member of an organization that advocated overthrow of the government by force or violence did not violate the defendant’s constitutional rights under the First or Fifth Amendments, and the defendant’s conviction was affirmed because the defendant’s membership was active, not nominal. |
| Southern Railway Co. v. North Carolina, 376 U.S. 93 (1964) | Under the Interstate Commerce Act, the Interstate Commerce Commission was not required to consider the profitability of a passenger service or potential freight operations when discontinuing an intrastate passenger line. |
| United States v. Container Corp., 393 U.S. 333 (1969) | In a civil antitrust case, sharing price data constitutes price stabilization in violation of the Sherman Act. |
| North Carolina v. Alford, 400 U.S. 25 (1970) | The Supreme Court denied the defendant’s post-conviction challenge to his murder conviction, holding that allowing a defendant to plead guilty without admitting his guilt does not violate the defendant’s constitutional rights so long as the guilty plea is entered after consulting with counsel and is his intelligent and voluntary choice in light of the evidence against him. |
| Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424 (1971) | The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employers from basing their hiring decisions on requirements or tests that are not a reasonable measure of job capability and that disproportionately disqualify persons based on classifications such as race. |
| Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Board of Education v. Scott, 404 U.S. 1221 (1971) | The Supreme Court denied the defendant’s petition to stay enforcement of the District Court’s order requiring a school district to use a court-imposed pupil assignment order entered to overcome racial segregation because of a delay in making the petition, a lack of specific allegations of hardship, and an inadequate record for determining whether the District Court correctly applied a prior case’s holdings. |
| Ross v. Moffitt, 417 U.S. 600 (1974) | The Fourteenth Amendment does not require appointment of counsel for indigent state defendants for discretionary state appeals or application for review by the United States Supreme Court. |
| Baker v. Owen, 423 U.S. 907 (1975) | By summary order, the Supreme Court affirmed the decision of a three-judge panel upholding the constitutionality of a state statute authorizing corporal punishment in the schools when reasonable force is applied to maintain discipline and determining on the facts presented that there were no Eighth Amendment or Fourteenth Amendment violations. |
| Blackledge v. Allison, 431 U.S. 63 (1977) | Guilty pleas present formidable barriers to post-conviction attacks made in collateral proceedings, but such challenges are not subject to summary dismissal if supported by sufficient factual assertions showing the guilty plea was affected by misunderstanding, duress, or misrepresentation. |
| Lorillard v. Pons, 434 U.S. 575 (1978) | The Age Discrimination in Employment Act provides parties with a right to a jury trial. |
| Moses H. Cone Memorial Hosp. v. Mercury Construction Corp., 460 U.S. 1 (1983) | An order staying an action seeking to compel arbitration is immediately appealable. Doubts about the scope of an arbitration agreement should be resolved in favor of arbitration, given the liberal federal policy favoring arbitration agreements as established in the Federal Arbitration Act. |
| McDonald v. Smith, 472 U.S. 479 (1985) | The Petition Clause of the First Amendment does not grant absolute immunity for libelous statements in petitions to government officials and petitions to the President that contain intentional and reckless falsehoods do not enjoy constitutional protection. |
| North Carolina DOT v. Crest Street Community Council, Inc., 479 U.S. 6 (1986) | Requests for attorney’s fees under the Civil Rights Attorney Fees Act must be made in the action seeking to enforce those civil rights and a separate lawsuit filed to recover those fees must be dismissed. |
| Patterson v. McLean Credit Union, 491 U.S. 164 (1989) | Section 1981, a federal statute that prohibits racial discrimination in the making and enforcement of private contracts, as then in effect, did not provide a cause of action for racial harassment. The statute did provide a cause of action for failure to promote based on race when a new contract is involved, but a plaintiff did not need to prove she was better qualified than the white employee who received the promotion; the statue required only purposeful discrimination. |
| Chauffeurs, Teamsters & Helpers, Local No. 391 v. Terry, 494 U.S. 558 (1990) | The plaintiff-employees were entitled under the Seventh Amendment to a jury trial on their claim that the union violated its duty of fair representation. |
| Brooke Group v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., 509 U.S. 209 (1993) | The Robinson–Patman Act bans predatory pricing only to the extent that it threatens to injure competition, and a plaintiff seeking to establish competitive injury resulting from a rival’s low prices must prove that the prices complained of are below an appropriate measure of its rival’s costs and that the competitor had a reasonable prospect of recouping its investment in below-cost prices. |
| FDA v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., 529 U.S. 120 (2000) | The Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, as then in effect, did not give the FDA authority to regulate tobacco products as customarily marketed without any claims of therapeutic benefits because Congress had created a separate statutory scheme to regulate it. |
| Harris v. United States, 536 U.S. 545 (2002) | Any fact that increases the mandatory minimum sentence for a crime but does not increase the maximum sentence available does not require a decision by a jury and it does not violate a defendant’s constitutional rights when that fact is found by the judge instead of the jury. This holding was later overruled in 2013 by Alleyne v. United States. |
| Environmental Defense v. Duke Energy Corp., 549 U.S. 561 (2007) | When a statute uses same word in multiple places, courts presume that the word was intended to have the same meaning. But that is not a rigid rule, and the presumption yields when the word is used in a way that reasonably warrants the conclusion that Congress intended for it to have different meanings in different parts of the statute. |
| Cooper v. Harris, 581 U.S. 285 (2017) | The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment limits racial gerrymanders in legislative districting plans, which are justified only if the State proves that its race-based sorting of voters serves a compelling interest and is narrowly tailored to that end. The District Court’s findings of an unconstitutional gerrymander were upheld because its factual determination that the redrawing of two congressional districts was predominately based on race was entitled to deference and there was no evidence of a good reason to justify using race as the predominant factor in the redistricting decision. A contrary result reached by a state court did not have preclusive effect because the lawsuits involved different plaintiffs. |
| North Carolina v. Covington, 581 U.S. 486 (2017) | In determining an appropriate remedy for racially gerrymandered legislative districts, courts must give careful case-specific consideration of all equitable factors. When considering whether to order a special election, such considerations include the severity and nature of the particular constitutional violation, the extent of the likely disruption to the ordinary processes of governance if early elections are imposed, and the need to act with proper judicial restraint when intruding on state sovereignty. |
| Rucho v. Common Cause, 588 U.S. 684 (2019) | While it is illegal for a jurisdiction to depart from the one-person, one-vote rule or to engage in racial discrimination in drawing legislative districting maps, a jurisdiction may constitutionally engage in political gerrymandering. Because partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts, the judgment of the trial court holding otherwise was vacated. |
| Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, 600 U.S. 181 (2023) | The core purpose of the equal protection clause is to do away with all governmentally imposed discrimination based on race, and any exception must further compelling governmental interests and be narrowly tailored and necessary to achieve that interest; such exceptions are rare. Harvard’s and UNC’s race-based admission programs used race as a stereotype and had no end date in sight, so they violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. |