April 7, 2008
Jim MorrillThe Charlotte Observer

Sitting on North Carolina's Supreme Court, Bob Orr was indistinguishable from his fellow black-robed justices.

It was the way he dressed for less formal meetings that raised an eyebrow.

"He would wear a pink shirt to conference just to irritate me," says then-Chief Justice I. Beverly Lake Jr., a conservative Republican. "I used to kid him about being a liberal."

Orr always defied easy labels.

He's a leading critic of tax incentives for businesses, a cause favored by many Republicans. In his first run for appeals court in 1988, he was the only Republican endorsed by African-American groups. But when he left the Supreme Court in 2004, it was to head a conservative advocacy group.

"He's hard to define," says Lake. "He's pretty middle-of-the-road."

Orr, 61, is one of five Republicans running for governor in the May 6 primary.

Raised in the western North Carolina town of Hendersonville, Orr has a fondness for golf, storytelling and Carolina basketball. He's affable and easygoing, with wire-rim glasses beneath a receding hairline.

On the Supreme Court, he took part in landmark decisions. He dissented in some, in one case defending the rights of victims of North Carolina's worst industrial disaster. He wrote for the majority in others, including a benchmark education case.

Since first appointed to the appeals court in 1986, he's won four statewide elections to North Carolina's top appellate courts and taken part in more than 3,000 rulings. He has a reputation for reaching out, in politics and on the bench. He even has won the respect of former rivals.

"He truly was an impartial judge with no agenda," says former appeals court judge Eddie Green, who defeated Orr in 1986 and later served alongside him.

Nervous interviewer

Orr once seemed headed toward a career in journalism. Instead, he went to law school with an eye on politics. He entered the judiciary essentially by accident.

At Hendersonville High in the early 1960s, he ran cross-country on a team that won the state championship his senior year. He also played two years as guard on the basketball team.

One summer, he went to radio station WHKP-AM and asked owner Art Cooley for a job.

"He said he would like to be on radio and did we have anything he could do," Cooley recalls.

Orr sold ads for a show called "Coon Dog Days" and spun rock-and-roll tunes at night. One day, Cooley handed him a tape recorder and asked him to go interview golfer Jack Nicklaus, who was playing near Asheville.

"Bobby came back and we listened to it," Cooley says. "And it was Jack Nicklaus interviewing him. So we said, 'Bobby, what happened?'

"He said, 'You know, I just got so nervous. Jack Nicklaus saw that I was nervous. He took the microphone away and interviewed me.' "

Orr's next taste of broadcasting came during college in Chapel Hill.

Working part-time for Charlotte's WSOC-TV, he helped its reporters cover Mecklenburg County's legislative delegation. After three years in college, Orr took a break. He enlisted in the Army and for two years served in Germany, filming war games and making training films.

He returned to Chapel Hill to finish a degree, then went to law school.

"I'd observed from covering the legislature," he says, "that a lot of the leaders were lawyers."

Orr practiced law in Asheville. In 1981, he got a job as an administrative assistant for his congressman, Republican Bill Hendon.

Three years later, he worked for Republican Jim Martin's gubernatorial campaign. After taking office, Martin put Orr, then nearing 40, on the Alcoholic Beverage Control commission. A year later, Martin asked Orr to join the state appeals court.

The appointment came in September. Orr had to run in November. Even though he lost to Green, a Democrat, Martin quickly named Orr to another vacancy on the same court. Orr was sworn in moments after his rival.

Doing the unexpected

In 1987, Patrice Lewis was in her final year at N.C. Central law school. She had a job lined up with the U.S. Justice Department when Orr came to campus.

The new appeals court judge was looking for a law clerk. At the time, few white judges of either party recruited at the predominantly black school.

"I left something that was a sure thing because I believed in him," says Lewis, now a law clerk in U.S. District Court in Charlotte. "He just impressed me as someone who was very earnest and very sincere. He was concerned about justice in a very fundamental sense."

Orr won elections to the appeals court in 1988 and again in 1992. He had support from Democratic-leaning groups such as the N.C. Association of Educators and a group representing black lawyers.

"I worked it really hard," he says of the endorsements. "They saw I was willing to do a good job and reach out."

Colleagues say he did the same with them.

"He was open and willing to hear what the other judges" said, says Green, the former judge. "You don't always get that, because the judges are so busy. Bob was different."

Orr left the appeals bench when he was elected to the Supreme Court in 1994. He was re-elected in 2002.

One of his first major votes came in a landmark 1996 case in which a court majority upheld tax breaks to private companies. Dissenting, Orr described the incentives as "corporate welfare" and unconstitutional.

Two years later, he dissented again in a case stemming from the 1991 Hamlet chicken plant fire that killed 25 and injured 56. The majority voted to prevent survivors and victims' families from suing the state, whose regulators had never inspected the plant. Orr rejected that.

"If government does something wrong, government should be held accountable," he says.

UNC law professor John Orth said: "He's transparently honest. There's no question that if you argued a case before him, he was going to listen and think about it and do his best to reach the right result."

In his final opinion before stepping down in 2004, Orr wrote for the majority in affirming a lower court ruling that the state wasn't fulfilling its constitutional guarantee of a sound basic education to every schoolchild.

"We cannot imperil even one more class unnecessarily," he wrote.

Constitutional issues

Running for governor, Orr often sounds like a former jurist.

Education. Economic development. To him, they're all issues grounded in the state constitution.

"He has thought deeply about the state constitution, and pays more attention to it than a lot of judges do," says Orth, a state constitutional scholar.

"He's a thoughtful moderate."

Former Chief Justice Burley Mitchell, a Democrat, says he considered Orr "a Teddy Roosevelt type of Republican, going in sort of social crusader" direction.

But when Orr abruptly quit the court in 2004, it was to lead the N.C. Institute for Constitutional Law, a conservative advocacy group.

"If I was going to make a change, I had to look at it," says Orr, who was 58.

Art Pope, the Raleigh Republican who started the institute, says Orr was "a natural fit."

"He believes in strict construction of the N.C. constitution," says Pope.

Robinson Everett, a Duke law professor and member of the Institute's board, calls Orr "conservative in terms of government, either state or federal, reaching out into areas he didn't think appropriate."

At the institute, Orr led fights against business incentives, the state lottery, and what he saw as partisan redistricting.

Critics are hard to find. State Sen. Tony Rand, a Cumberland County Democrat, has been on the opposite side from Orr on the lottery and other issues.

"He just views the world a little differently than I do," Rand says. "But he's a gentleman."

Orr says he follows the law "regardless of the outcome."

"If you look at 18 years' worth of decisions, my record reflects a range of decisions."