North Carolina’s Chief Justice Sarah Parker has suspended the rotation of Superior Court Judges, effective beginning July 20, 2009 and continuing through August 28, 2009, due to the State’s budget crisis.  There’s an Amended Master Calendar Of Superior Courts available which shows where Judges will be holding court during the suspension period. 

Rotation of Superior Court Judges is required by the North Carolina Constitution, which says in Article 4, Section 11 that "[t]he principle of rotating Superior Court Judges among the various districts of a division is a salutary one and shall be observed."  The AOC website says that "[t]he rotation system helps avoid favoritism that might result from having a permanent judge in one district."

There’s a bill pending in the Legislature which says that nothing prohibits the Chief Justice "in times of severe financial difficulty, from temporarily suspending rotation under this subsection as a cost‑saving measure so long as rotation is resumed as soon as practicable in order to honor the constitutional mandate to observe the principle of rotation."

This isn’t the first time that the rotation of Judges has been suspended for fiscal reasons.  It happened in 1990 and also in 2002, according to a 2002 Triangle Business Journal article.

The photo at the top does not necessarily represent my personal views on this cost-saving measure.