North Carolina bar owners who sued the state over Covid-19 lockdown rules can take their case to trial, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled Friday.
It comes more than four years after the lockdowns ended, and one month after the target of the lawsuit — former Gov. Roy Cooper, who issued the lockdown orders in question — launched a nationally watched U.S. Senate campaign for the 2026 elections.
The 5-2 ruling divided the court along party lines.
The court's Republican majority ruled that whenever emergency orders stop people or businesses from making money, that could be a violation of their constitutional rights.
The two Democrats dissented, writing that the governor needs the ability to act quickly — even if it means making imperfect decisions in hindsight — because protecting public safety in an emergency often requires taking sweeping actions made with limited information.
North Carolina's constitution goes further than the U.S. Constitution does when it comes to guaranteeing financial opportunity — a distinction that was at the center of Friday’s decision. The state constitution declares that North Carolinians "are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, the enjoyment of the fruits of their own labor, and the pursuit of happiness."
That "fruits of their own labor" guarantee was put in the state constitution after the Civil War, to hammer home the end of slavery in North Carolina. But in the last decade it has been the subject of a wave of new, broader interpretations in court, including in Friday’s ruling.
Justice Phil Berger Jr., writing for the majority, opined that Cooper over-extended his authority in reacting to the pandemic.
"Even in a declared emergency, the powers of those who act on behalf of the people have limits," Berger wrote. "And the citizens of this state rejected 'because I said so' governance long ago."
Berger’s father, Republican state Senate leader Phil Berger Sr., and other GOP lawmakers have successfully pushed, since the pandemic, to rewrite state law to limit the power of the governor to issue emergency orders in the future. They've also made other unsuccessful pushes — like an attempt last year to ban people from wearing facemasks, even for health reasons. It won support from every Republican state senator but was
rejected by the House of Representatives after attracting broad public criticism.
A spokesman for Cooper declined to comment on the ruling Friday, and spokespeople for Gov. Josh Stein, who has inheirited the lawsuit from his predecessor, didn't respond to a request for comment.
When the North Carolina Court of Appeals issued a partial ruling in favor of the bar owners last year, Raleigh entrepreneur Zack Medford told WRAL that "[Cooper's] decision forced many of these bars to eventually close permanently. Today’s ruling makes it clear that the governor was wrong, and now the state needs to make it right."
Medford had to shut down four Raleigh bars he owned because of the pandemic lockdowns: Coglin's, Paddy O'Beers, Isaac Hunter's Tavern and Parliament. He's since opened a new business, Tap Yard, but in the meantime has been working with other bar owners from across the state
to get repayment for lost income due to the lockdowns.
Friday’s ruling in favor of Medford and the others is just one in a series of new rulings from the state's Republican-led Supreme Court that have taken a more skeptical eye toward the governor's power specifically over Covid lockdowns.
The government is typically immune from being sued, and in this case from the bar owners, Cooper originally won by having their claims dismissed because of that immunity. But that happened before the rulings in other lockdown-related cases,
including one about an Alamance County speedway that refused to follow lockdown orders, and Berger wrote Friday that there needs to be a trial taking into account that new precedent.
Cooper’s response to the pandemic is expected to come under additional scrutiny by Republicans as he seeks his party’s nomination for the state’s open U.S. Senate seat in 2026. Former Lt. Gov. Dan Forest, a Republican who challenged Cooper for governor in 2020, made calls to
reopen the state during the pandemic the main focus of his unsuccessful campaign to unseat Cooper.
In Friday’s ruling the court’s two Democratic justices said would’ve ruled in favor of Cooper, a fellow Democrat, and not ordered a new trial. They wrote that their opposition had nothing to do with politics, but rather a concern for public safety.
“Courts cannot 'Monday morning quarterback' state actions taken in the midst of an unprecedented global pandemic," Justice Allison Riggs wrote in the dissent. Riggs first joined the court after Cooper appointed her to a vacancy. She was then elected to her current term in 2024.
In her dissent, she said Cooper "did not have the luxury of commissioning a peer-reviewed study to research the exact effect of different possible governmental regulations on the spread of a deadly disease. To protect lives, the Governor had to act based on the science that was available at the time."
Berger acknowledged Riggs’ dissent but dismissed her arguments as "bizarre and angry."
The case is one of the first major political decisions made by the Supreme Court since Republicans on the court
attempted to overturn Riggs' narrow victory in the 2024 election.
Her Republican challenger, state Appeals Court Judge Jefferson Griffin, had challenged thousands of voters over alleged discrepancies — and used legal strategies that avoided challenging all questionable ballots, instead focusing only on certain counties and demographics that lean Democratic. Griffin told the court that if they ruled in his favor, he believed that he would replace Riggs on the court.
Four of the court's five Republicans sided with Griffin. But the effort was later blocked in federal court, when a judge ruled that the Supreme Court's order would've
violated the constitutional rights of the voters whose ballots the state justices wanted to throw out.
