How Gray Wilson and NCBF Are Advancing Judicial Education for NC Students
Gray Wilson
“Onward and upward” is how Gray Wilson describes his aspirations for the North Carolina Bar Foundation civic education website, ExploreNCCourts.org, scheduled to launch this June.
The website has been in the making for five years. In 2021, Wilson was struck by the idea of establishing a judicial learning center for K-12 students in North Carolina. He wanted students to learn about the judicial system in the state through an experience that would be both engaging and memorable.
Wilson brought this idea to the NCBA. Clayton Morgan, the president at the time, appointed the Judicial Learning Center and Civic Education Committee in 2023 to develop this project. While Wilson had initially envisioned the center as housed in a physical building, there were constraints related to the feasibility of an in-person facility.
Morgan suggested creating a website, which would open opportunities for students across the state to access the resource.
The project began to take shape as a collaborative effort led by Wilson, members of the Committee and North Carolina Bar Foundation staff.
During the next stage in the project, the Committee examined the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction’s standards, which require students to learn about the three branches of government in eighth grade. Instructors educate students about the federal government, but there are few resources related to North Carolina government. After discussing these state benchmarks and the goals of the Judicial Learning Center, the group specifically designed the website for eighth-grade students.
By offering resources for students and teachers, ExploreNCCourts.org meets this need. The website provides students an interactive timeline with 60 individual nodes spanning from 1663 to today. When students click on the different points in the chronology, they can read about the historical context for that year, access photos and navigate to additional links. Seven animated explainer videos describing individual topics related to the judiciary are also available.
Each node on the timeline includes historical material for students, and the website also offers resources for teachers. Twelve lesson plans, which include six 50-minute and six 25-minute plans, are accessible. Teachers can choose from two lesson plan options: a 50-minute plan and a shorter one.
To learn more about this project, we spoke with Wilson about its inception and its potential to provide support to teachers and inspiration to students. Read the interview with Wilson below.
Could you describe how you initially became interested in establishing a resource for students that was focused on the judiciary in the state?
It was a result of my travels as a state bar officer to some of the national conferences, and at one of them, I attended a program where there was discussion about these judicial learning centers. They had a wealth of information, and I copied every bit of that and brought a box back to North Carolina. As soon as I was in a position to do so, I tried to assemble a committee to look into it. And that really ended up in frustration again when the report was that this was not something that our state was going to ever be able to accommodate. I did go through a litany of other potential organizations that might provide a home for this concept. And it was the North Carolina Bar Association that finally stepped up to the plate.
Could you share more about how the project has developed since the task force was appointed?
The prelude to that is it was about five years of effort to get the task force appointed, and Past President Clayton Morgan is to be credited for that. But the interest was based on something I learned when I was State Bar president. And that was the existence of freestanding learning centers associated with a judicial campus in a number of other states. There have been a number of experiments like this throughout the United States, and most of them failed. There are still a couple of good programs, one in Missouri and one in Colorado, and they’re taking five to ten thousand students, middle and sometimes high school students, to these centers every year there to get acquainted with how the judiciary in their state and sometimes the federal government works.
So I tried to market that program all over North Carolina. I went to the State Bar, then I went to the North Carolina Historical Society. I went to one other charitable entity before coming to my first love, the North Carolina Bar Association, which I should have done first, which was not initially interested in the program. And there was then the leadership of Clayton Morgan, who came up with the idea of a website as opposed to trying to build an actual freestanding structure in Raleigh — I’d already picked out the site, and the city would have donated the site to us to try to develop a program that was virtual or online. From that suggestion, the committee was formed three years ago. And we began to work to try to develop what we have today with the current platform, and that is a uniform, interactive, online, entertaining, engaging — and that’s the most important part of the program — presentation for middle school students throughout the state as part of the regular curriculum approved by the Department of Education.
It sounds like a wonderful joint effort.
It really was — it was collaborative. And I thought Morgan’s insights helped to temper some of my overarching expectations with regard to the initial launch of a program like this. As far as I know, to the extent that we bring this online, it will be the first program of its kind in this country.
As the project developed, volunteers examined the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction standards to create 60 nodes, or points, on the interactive timeline. What are some of the key insights you hope students gain from using this resource?
Well, I hope they will understand how the judiciary works in terms of the rule of law, which is to treat everyone with respect, but also more importantly, or just as important, impartiality, and that our judicial system does work despite the criticism that has been levied against it in recent years, locally and nationally, as a badly imperfect system for which there’s none better than I know of on this earth after over four decades of practice.
I don’t know how popular it will be, but my own opinion was that this type of judicial center was to target seventh and eighth grade students, not even high school or college students, because I recall that William McAdoo, who was the Secretary of the Treasury under Woodrow Wilson when he was president, and he was quite an ambitious man, but also arrogant, and he wanted to run for president himself, but could not ever gain support in that regard. But he is remembered to this day for his one comment, and that is, you cannot win an argument with an ignorant man.
And it occurred to me that rather than battle the fixed opinions of those who have already reached adulthood, perhaps maybe with young minds, dangerous minds, we might plant the seed about how the judiciary actually works, how it’s designed, how it functions, because I’m pretty confident that it works pretty well in my own experience traveling around this state. I go to courtrooms all over North Carolina. And there are some times when I’m not completely happy with the outcome, but I think the system that we have is the best that can be achieved.
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What were some of the challenges that the committee faced in bringing this project about?
Well, they were manifold because we had to try to develop with our own history here in North Carolina, the history of the judiciary, and the type of interactive online program that would be able to engage students at the middle school level, and this platform had to be something that would command their attention, without which it would be a waste. And in developing that, we looked to historical timelines that were important here in North Carolina and tried to buttonhole those and then interweave those with certain concepts about how the judiciary functions, how the court system is set up, how it operates, what juries actually do and that sort of thing.
This was a program that from the outset was designed, and I insisted on this, as something that was not to be a curriculum that one would have to be tested on at the conclusion of and get a passing grade. I wanted it to work the way that the Constitutional Law Center works in Washington, D.C., where the children pile in there and have all sorts of entertaining modules that they can work with and play with and learn about how the American judicial system works and enjoy it.
We are thankful for your leadership and for our members who have taken time to create this project and work on it. What are some of your specific contributions to the project?
Having worked on it five years before it found a home, I already had certain fixed notions about what it should and should not do. In making that decision, I had reviewed extensively how the judicial learning centers in other states did work and what worked well and what did not work well. The same would be true for the National Constitution Center in D.C., to try to fashion a program that would meet the needs of our youth but also educate them in a way that was appropriate and again engaging. So, yes, I have a certain bias. I wanted it to be something that would engage the students so that they would interact with it and participate in it in that fashion, as opposed to having to absorb knowledge about the judicial system by rote learning. And there would be modules where they would work on one, and having succeeded on that one, they could move to the next level. They would learn a good bit of history in the process because the history of the judiciary in this state is fascinating. It really is. There have been some tortuous courses that it had to follow over time as the history of this country developed.
What are some of the ways that developing this project has been rewarding?
For one, it’s the only committee I’ve ever served on where I think a majority were members of the judiciary, either active or retired. When you have been a trial lawyer 40 plus years, you get to know a lot of judges. I picked them to be on the committee, and every one of them that I asked to serve has done so and has attended the meetings and participated in them and just had wonderful suggestions that mere lawyers and the lay public don’t really know about because we’re not on that side of the screen. That was very helpful, I thought, probably more than anything else. We have a wonderful staff at the Bar Center to work with. Sara and Alex and Kim have been terrific. They’ve helped me at every stage, and they’ve also directed and corrected me when perhaps I was overly zealous.
In what ways is it meaningful to work on this project with a team of NCBA members?
The part of that is they’re of all stripes. We have young lawyers on the team, and they have insights that are unique. We’ve got mere trial lawyers, litigators like me on the team who are very familiar with the court systems. And then we have the involvement of the judiciary. It’s a strange and wonderful mix that has really worked well. There hasn’t been an argument that I can recall at any of these meetings about the direction we were heading in. We would talk about matters like that, achieve a consensus and move on to the next threshold.
The Bar Association represents everything that’s good about the bar in this state with the active participation of so many who give their time freely as volunteers to give something back to the profession. Because I did learn soon after I passed the bar that having a law license does not put a racing stripe down your back. There is an obligation, ethical and otherwise, and fundamental, to try to give something back to the public that we are supposed to be serving. And I can’t think of a better way to do that than through the education of our youth, who, I hope, will grow up to understand and respect our judicial system, to honor it and participate in it, and ennoble us all in the process.
How does this project illuminate one of the North Carolina Bar Foundation’s goals, which is for members of the profession to provide leadership that profoundly impacts the public?
The leadership that we provide in getting a program like this off the ground should have a lasting impression on the public and, I hope, to the teachers of this state who will be shepherding this system to all of these classrooms of eighth graders. Even at this stage with the modules we have, the project is really in its infancy. There’s much more that can be developed by way of historical and other timelines to educate our youth about a number of other facets of the judiciary. We’re just really scratching the surface at this point. The rule of law is not a concept easily absorbed by the general public. So I’d say from this starting point, per aspera ad astra. That’s Latin for with hope to the stars. I would like there to be a plethora of online interactive programs. These are 30-minute to 50-minute segments to sprinkle among the public school system curriculum in this state. And it’s not just for public schools. It’s for private schools, church schools and charter schools, and homeschools.
Jessica Junqueira is communications manager for the North Carolina Bar Association.