Anita Earls (born February 20, 1960) is an American civil rights attorney who has served as an associate justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court since 2019.
On November 6, 2018, Earls defeated Republican incumbent Justice Barbara Jackson in a three-candidate election to win a seat on the state's highest court.
Upon graduation Earls received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to study the role of women in Ujamaa villages in Tanzania, but her time abroad was cut short by multiple bouts of malaria.
[13] A federal court then ordered a special master to redraw the districts' boundaries for the 2018 election, where under the new maps, state Democrats broke the legislature's nearly decade-long Republican supermajority.
Citing unnamed sources, the Washington Post reported that Earls was among the short-list of candidates under consideration by the Biden administration for nomination to the United States Supreme Court to replace retiring Justice Breyer.
23-cv-00734) accusing North Carolina's judicial ethics commission of launching an investigation into her that stifles her First Amendment-protected criticism of the lack of diversity in the state's courts, stemming from a Law360 interview in which she discussed potential "implicit biases" among her colleagues, a lack of Black law clerks being hired, and how the court's new conservative majority had disbanded a commission tasked with examining racial and gender inequality in the judicial system.