The Constitutional Commission of 1957-58

by John L. Sanders, Director of the Institute of Government, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

At the request of Governor Luther H. Hodges, the General Assembly of 1957 authorized the Governor to appoint a fifteen-member Constitutional Commission to study the need for changes in the Constitution and to make recommendations to the Governor and the 1959 General Assembly.

That Commission recommended rewriting the whole Constitution and submitting it to the voters for approval or disapproval as a unit, the changes suggested being too numerous to be effected by individual amendments. The proposed Constitution drafted by the Commission represented in large part a careful job of editorial pruning, rearrangement, clarification, and modernization, but it also included several significant substantive changes. The Senate would have been increased from 50 to 60 members and the initiative (but not the sole authority) for decennial redistricting of the Senate would have been shifted from the General Assembly to an ex-officio committee of three legislative officers. Decennial reapportionment of the House of Representatives would have been made a duty of the Speaker of the House, rather than of the General Assembly as a whole. Problems of succession to Constitutional State executive offices and of determination of issues of officers' disability would have been either resolved in the Constitution or their resolution assigned to the General Assembly. The authority to classify property for taxation and to exempt property from taxation would have been required to be exercised only by the General Assembly and only on a uniform, statewide basis. The requirement that the public schools Constitute a "general and uniform system" would have been eliminated, and the Constitutional authority of the State Board of Education reduced. Fairly extensive changes were recommended in the judicial article of the Constitution, including the establishment of a General Court of Justice with an Appellate Division, a Superior Court Division, and a Local Trial Court Division. A uniform system of District Courts and Trial Commissioners would have replaced the existing multitude of inferior courts and justices of the peace, the creation of an intermediate Court of Appeals would have been provided for, and uniformity of jurisdiction of the courts within each division would have been required. Otherwise, the General Assembly would have retained essentially its then-existing power over the courts, their jurisdiction, and their procedures.

The General Assembly of 1959 also had before it a recommendation for a Constitutional amendment with respect to the court system that had originated with a Court Study Committee of the North Carolina Bar Association. In general, the recommendations of that Committee called for more fundamental changes in the courts than those of the Constitutional Commission. The principal difference between the two sets of recommendations lay in the extent of the proposed authority of the General Assembly over the courts. The Constitutional Commission generally favored legislative authority over the courts and proposed only moderate curtailment of it; the Court Study Committee accepted more literally the concept of an independent judiciary and its proposals would have minimized the authority of the General Assembly over the courts of the State, though structurally, its system would have been much like that of the Constitutional Commission.

The proposed Constitution received extended attention from the General Assembly of 1959. The Senate modified and passed the bill to submit the proposed Constitution to the voters, but it failed to pass the House, due chiefly to the inability of the supporters of the two divergent approaches to court revision to reach agreement.

As had been true of the proposed Constitution of 1933, the proposed Constitution of 1959, though not adopted as a whole, subsequently provided the material for several amendment proposals that were submitted individually to the voters and approved by them during the next decade.

In the General Assembly of 1961, the proponents of court reform were successful in obtaining enactment of a Constitutional amendment, approved by the voters in 1962, creating a unified and uniform General Court of Justice for the State. Other amendments submitted by the same session and approved by the voters provided for the automatic decennial reapportionment of the State House of Representatives, clarified the provisions for succession to elective State executive offices and disability determination, authorized a reduction in the residence period for voters for President, allowed increases in the compensation of elected state executive officers during their terms, and required that the power of the General Assembly to classify and exempt property for taxation be exercised by it alone and only on a uniform, statewide basis.

The session of 1963 submitted two amendments: One to enlarge the rights of married women to deal with their own property was approved by the voters; one to enlarge the Senate from fifty to seventy members and allocate one Representative to each county was rejected by the voters. The General Assembly of 1965 submitted and the voters approved an amendment authorizing the legislative creation of a Court of Appeals.

The 1967 General Assembly proposed and the voters approved amendments authorizing the General Assembly to fix its own compensation and revising the legislative apportionment scheme to conform to the judicially-established requirement of representation in proportion to population in both houses.