Let’s find out who Jefferson Griffin, the Republican running for NC Supreme Court, is, and what it means to be an ‘originalist’ judge.
So far, we’ve talked a lot about Allison Riggs, the Democratic NC Supreme Court incumbent and voting rights attorney who’s running for re-election this year. But what about Jefferson Griffin, the guy who’s running against her?
Here’s what you need to know about him. Griffin is a Republican who’s sat on the state Court of Appeals since 2020. Before that, he was a district court judge.
And, if he’s elected to the state Supreme Court and has to rule on a law banning abortion or IVF—which isn’t at all unrealistic, I would call it likely even—we don’t have to guess how Griffin would decide. He’s all but told us.
In October 2023, Griffin joined another conservative Court of Appeals judge in ruling that a mother could lose her parental rights to her infant if she committed a crime while pregnant. In their reasoning, they argued that “life begins at conception.”
You’ve probably heard that before. It’s a buzz phrase among anti-abortion rights activists. Griffin pulled it from a NC Supreme Court ruling from back in 1949 that was about property rights and inheritance, of all things. But using Griffin’s logic, it’s pretty easy to see how he’d rule in an abortion case or in an IVF case as a Supreme Court justice.
It fits pretty neatly into Griffin’s definition of himself. On his campaign website, he calls himself an “originalist” or a “textualist” when it comes to the Constitution.
Let’s break that down into real people talk.
When people say that, they’re saying that they consider the word of the Constitution to be fixed and immovable. In other words, originalists believe that the judges who decide how laws govern our lives should interpret the Constitution based on the laws at the time they were written—not based on the context of modern times.
The argument against that, of course, is that early America was an agrarian society, Black people were kept as property, and women were second-class citizens in more ways than one–one of the big ones being they couldn’t vote. So, ya know, the founding fathers might have had some great ideas, but you could hardly say they were crushing it on civil rights.
That’s food for thought, right? It’s just one reason why the state Supreme Court election is really important. Griffin is an originalist. Allison Riggs is not. One of them is going to be making decisions about your future, especially the rights of women to make choices about their health — and now that you know, YOU can choose who gets to do it.
For more coverage of the NC Supreme Court race, follow @cardinalandpine.
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