On this episode of Legal Magnolias, hosts Maggie and Sonya talk with North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls about her campaign to remain on the state's highest court and why so many of the rights people care about now rest with state courts rather than federal ones. Justice Earls walks through her path from civil rights litigator to the bench and why she ran for the state's highest court directly rather than working her way up through the lower courts.

The conversation covers a lot of ground: the Leandro decision and the state's constitutional promise of a "sound basic education," a utilities ruling that lets North Carolinians in different parts of the state pay different rates for the same power, and why Justice Earls has written an unusually high number of dissents in recent years. She also breaks down how partisan gerrymandering actually works, why state supreme court races are decided by razor-thin margins, and why she believes judicial independence should be what voters weigh when they get to that part of the ballot. In eloquent and simple terms, Justice Earls reminds us how and why every vote matters.

About the guest

Justice Anita Earls has served on the North Carolina Supreme Court since 2018, when she became the first justice elected in the court's newly partisan elections. Before taking the bench, she practiced civil rights law, including at the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division, and founded the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, where she worked for over a decade before running for the state's highest court. On the bench, she has become known for detailed, plainly written dissents on redistricting, environmental protection, and utility regulation, and for her advocacy around judicial independence and voter turnout in down-ballot races. She is currently seeking re-election to her seat this November. Learn more: https://earls4justice.com/

Legal Magnolias is a podcast from Magnolia Legal in Durham, North Carolina — hosted by Sonya Linton and Maggie Davis. Follow the show on LinkedIn and Facebook. Learn more about the firm at magnolialegal.com.

Music by Tim Sheahan | Everyday Knife Fight | Chapel Hill, NC

Produced by Sara Hofman | McNeely Web Design | Raleigh, NC

Enjoying the podcast? Please leave us a review — it genuinely helps our audience find us.

On this episode of Legal Magnolias, hosts Maggie and Sonya talk with Jen Story, a longtime friend of Maggie's from law school and supervising attorney at Campbell Law School's Richardson Family Education Equity Clinic, about what North Carolina actually owes its kids in a classroom. Jen walks through why the state's constitution guarantees every child a "sound basic education," why a case testing that promise has been in court since the 1990s, and what happens when a legislature simply doesn't release the funding a court says it owes.

She also gets into some of the assumptions that turn out to be wrong: why moving a child with a disability into a "special" classroom can violate the law even when it's meant well, why suspending a struggling student often makes the underlying problem worse instead of better, and how one small rural county ended up with three school districts a few miles apart, each funded completely differently.

About the guest

Jen spent years representing students and families against the school districts failing them, first at Legal Aid's Right to Education Project and now at Campbell Law. It's a conversation about what it actually costs to make a constitutional right real, and why Jen — after decades in this fight — still calls herself hopeful.

Learn more about Jen Story and the Richardson Family Education Equity Clinic here.

Legal Magnolias is a podcast from Magnolia Legal in Durham, North Carolina — hosted by Sonya Linton and Maggie Davis. Follow the show on LinkedIn and Facebook. Learn more about the firm at magnolialegal.com.

Music by Tim Sheahan | Everyday Knife Fight | Chapel Hill, NC

Produced by Sara Hofman | McNeely Web Design | Raleigh, NC

Enjoying the podcast? Please leave us a review — it genuinely helps our audience find us.

On this episode of Legal Magnolias, hosts Maggie and Sonya talk with Meredith Nicholson and Milan Pham about representing LGBTQ+ families in North Carolina, before, during, and after marriage equality. Meredith and Milan walk through some of the assumptions that turn out to be wrong, like why having your name on your child's birth certificate doesn't automatically make you their legal parent, or how families protected each other through ordinary contracts years before marriage was ever an option. They also get into the practical, less obvious side of the work: rewriting wills and estate planning documents so they don't assume every client fits neatly into "husband" and "wife," and what's changing right now in how families are planning for the future.

Today, their Durham firm, NicholsonPham, is one of North Carolina's go-to practices for LGBTQ+ families navigating marriage, parentage, adoption, and estate planning, handled by attorneys who are part of the community they represent.

Meredith and Milan also talk about allyship in a more personal way — what it's meant for Meredith to grow into that role through her law partnership with Milan, and how Milan describes allyship as an open door that not everyone chooses to walk through.

It's a conversation about how much of family law most of us have never had to think about — until, suddenly, we do.

Learn more about Meredith, Milan, and NicholsonPham: https://nicholsonpham.com/

Legal Magnolias is a podcast from Magnolia Legal in Durham, North Carolina — hosted by Sonya Linton and Maggie Davis. Follow the show on LinkedIn and Facebook. Learn more about the firm at magnolialegal.com.

Music by Tim Sheahan | Everyday Knife Fight | Chapel Hill, NC

Produced by Sara Hofman | McNeely Web Design | Raleigh, NC

Enjoying the podcast? Please leave us a review — it genuinely helps our audience find us.

This episode is about a phrase that was born right here in North Carolina, and about what happens when we ask who actually gets protected. Environmental justice sits where environmental law and social justice meet, and it's less about whether pollution happens than about who ends up living next to it. Hosts Maggie and Sonya sit down with Chandra T. Taylor-Sawyer, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center and leader of its Environmental Justice Initiative, for a conversation twenty years in the making.

Chandra takes us through what's changed since the start of the environmental justice movement and what hasn't, why "resilience" might be the single word that best explains who survives environmental harm and who doesn't, and the legal mechanics behind proving discrimination under civil rights law, including why the difference between intent and impact matters so much in court. It's a conversation about power, about what it would take for private industry to just be better neighbors, and about why Chandra, twenty years into this fight, still calls herself hopeful.

About our guest

Chandra T. Taylor-Sawyer is a senior attorney in the Southern Environmental Law Center's Chapel Hill office, where she leads the Environmental Justice Initiative and focuses on water quality and environmental justice issues. She has worked at SELC since 2006, leading efforts in North Carolina to force cleanups at contaminated industrial sites, fight water pollution, and shape landfill and transit policy, including a 2007 overhaul of North Carolina's Solid Waste Management Act to protect lower-wealth communities and communities of color from disproportionate harm. She also serves as an adjunct professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law and sits on the board of the North Carolina Justice Center. A native of Kinston, North Carolina, Chandra earned both her undergraduate and law degrees from UNC. Learn more: selc.org/staff/chandra-taylor

Legal Magnolias is a podcast from Magnolia Legal in Durham, North Carolina — hosted by Sonya Linton and Maggie Davis. Follow the show on LinkedIn and Facebook. Learn more about the firm at magnolialegal.com.

Music by Tim Sheahan | Everyday Knife Fight | Chapel Hill, NC

Produced by Sara Hofman | McNeely Web Design | Raleigh, NC

Enjoying the podcast? Please leave us a review — it genuinely helps our audience find us.

This episode of Legal Magnolias is a conversation about law, but also about home, legacy, and what it really means to keep land, and family, together. Heirs property — inherited real estate passed down without a clear title — quietly affects millions of American families, and it's often misunderstood as a niche or narrowly racial issue. Hosts Sonya and Maggie sit down with Mavis Gragg, CEO of HeirShares and a leading voice in heirs property law, to unpack what it really means to own land as a family across generations.

Mavis shares the deeply personal story that led her into this work and realizing that, even as a practicing attorney, she wasn't equipped to protect her own family's land. From there, the conversation moves through the hidden history of women building family wealth through real estate, the myths around what heirs property actually is, why a will alone doesn't solve the problem, and why this issue crosses every community — not just the ones the headlines usually mention

About our guest:
Mavis Gragg is a self-described "death and dirt" attorney and conservation professional empowering families to use real estate for intergenerational resiliency and wealth. She is CEO of HeirShares, a legal-tech company helping families navigate heirs property and title issues, and serves as a member of the North Carolina Parks and Recreation Authority. She previously chaired the board of the Triangle Land Conservancy. Beyond the law: Mavis is also a passionate art enthusiast in Durham — she serves on the North Carolina Museum of Art Foundation board and the Nasher Museum Friends' Board, and co-founded Black Girl Basel, connecting collectors with artists. Learn more: mavisgragg.com

Follow Legal Magnolias:
New episodes drop weekly. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen, and leave a review. Follow us on Instagram @legalmagnolias for more content.

Legal Magnolias is a podcast from Magnolia Legal in Durham, North Carolina — hosted by Sonya Linton and Maggie Davis. Follow the show on LinkedIn and Facebook. Learn more about the firm at magnolialegal.com.

Music by Tim Sheahan | Everyday Knife Fight | Chapel Hill, NC

Produced by Sara Hofman | McNeely Web Design | Raleigh, NC

Enjoying the podcast? Please leave us a review — it genuinely helps our audience find us.

Most of what's happening in immigration right now isn't showing up in the headlines. In our first full episode, we sit down with two women who've spent decades in the trenches of immigration law: Heather Crews, owner of Sivaraman Immigration Law, and Meghan Deutsch-Blanco, owner of Deutsch-Blanco Law, PLLC — one focused on employment-based work with universities, medical practices, and rural schools, the other on families, humanitarian cases, and citizenship.

Together they walk us through the story you're not being told — the Ukrainians whose work permits aren't being renewed, the Venezuelans losing Temporary Protected Status, the surprise $100,000 H-1B fee, and what happens when the people who came here "the right way" wake up to find the rules changed overnight.

Get comfortable, take your shoes off, criss-cross applesauce, and let's get into it.

Guests Meghan-Deutsch Blanco and Heather Crews counsel individuals and businesses from around the world in immigration law cases.

Legal Magnolias is a podcast from Magnolia Legal in Durham, North Carolina — hosted by Sonya Linton and Maggie Davis. Follow the show on LinkedIn and Facebook. Learn more about the firm at magnolialegal.com.

Music by Tim Sheahan | Everyday Knife Fight | Chapel Hill, NC

Produced by Sara Hofman | McNeely Web Design | Raleigh, NC

Enjoying the podcast? Please leave us a review — it genuinely helps our audience find us.

Welcome to Legal Magnolias — a podcast about the women lawyers taking up space, one conversation at a time.

In this quick prologue, hosts Sonya Linton (estate planning attorney) and Maggie Davis (real estate attorney) — law partners at Magnolia Legal in Durham, North Carolina — share the origin story of the show. It starts at the North Carolina Association of Women Attorneys dinner, where Dean Nikia Davis lit them on fire with a challenge: stop waiting for permission, and take up the space you've earned. She held up an image of a pregnant Statue of Liberty, knee-deep in the muck and still lifting her flame, and asked the room: what is your flame?

That night — plus Sonya's signature "yes, and" — turned into this: a Season One of deeply nerdy (never boring) conversations with feminist legal voices doing exactly what Dean Davis called out. Taking up space. No asking permission. No apologies.

So get comfortable, take your shoes off, criss-cross applesauce, and let's get into it.

New episodes coming soon. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss one.

Legal Magnolias is a podcast from Magnolia Legal in Durham, North Carolina — hosted by Sonya Linton and Maggie Davis. Follow the show on LinkedIn and Facebook. Learn more about the firm at magnolialegal.com.

Music by Tim Sheahan | Everyday Knife Fight | Chapel Hill, NC

Produced by Sara Hofman | McNeely Web Design | Raleigh, NC

Enjoying the podcast? Please leave us a review — it genuinely helps our audience find us.