Former North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Willis Padgett Whichard, one of four individuals widely credited for securing passage of the state’s Coastal Area Management Act, died Monday in Chapel Hill, sources close to the family confirmed this week.
A 1962 graduate of the University of North Carolina, Whichard left Chapel Hill three years later with a law degree. He served two terms as member of North Carolina House of Representatives from 1970 until 1974, when he was first elected to the state Senate. Whichard served three Senate terms and, in 1980, Gov. Jim Hunt appointed Whichard to the North Carolina Court of Appeals. In 1986 he became an associate justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, serving until he retired in 1998.
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“While a sitting justice, he somehow found time to earn his doctorate of systematic jurisprudence from the University of Virginia,” according to a Carolina Alumni article about his General Alumni Association Distinguished Service Medal citation. “That is the top degree possible for a legal scholar—one that very few lawyers and judges possess.” The citations are read aloud during the annual alumni luncheon and then presented to recipients.
Author, musician and UNC professor Bland Simpson called Whichard “an almost legendary man of many superlatives, and one of the most important of his legion of accomplishments was helping move the Coastal Area Management Act through the legislature in 1973-74.”
In an email Monday, Simpson told Coastal Review that he and Whichard spoke of the fight for CAMA on numerous occasions, “and he always said there were four individuals key to making this all-important bill into law.” Those individuals were then-Gov. James Holshouser, Milton Heath, who was a professor at UNC’s Institute of Government and wrote the bill, Sen. Bill Staton of Lee County, and Rep. Whichard from Durham County, who Simpson said carried the bill through the House.
“When CAMA passed the legislature, it was widely seen as the most comprehensive, progressive, protective coastal legislation become law in the nation,” Simpson said. “Whichard was a giant, a visionary, and the last surviving member of the quartet that gave us CAMA.”
Author, photographer, conservationist and attorney Tom Earnhardt told Coastal Review in an email Tuesday that in summer 1970, he worked a student clerkship with the Powe, Porter and Alphin law firm in Durham.
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“E.K. Powe and others in the firm were well known North Carolina lawyers,” Earnhardt said, adding that the lawyer who taught him the most Whichard, then the youngest lawyer with the firm. “Bill always made the time to read and give a quick edit to anything I prepared. Always a mentor, he was exactly the same Bill Whichard I’ve known for the last 55 years — humble, patient, compassionate, and brilliant.”
Earnhardt said that, years later, he worked with Gov. James Holshouser to secure legislative funding for Cape Lookout National Seashore. He said that Whichard, then a House member, quickly took up the cause.
“After I had gotten several emphatic rejections from more senior officials, Bill assured me he’d help find the money. I still remember his political assessment of the North Carolina General Assembly at the time: ‘You’ve got to remember that in the General Assembly there will always be Members who will vote against the Creation to preserve the pre-existing darkness!’”
Earnhardt said that in each of Whichard’s roles, he “was always the brightest light in the room. No one has served North Carolina better.”
That sentiment was shared in the Campbell Law Review’s spring 2006 edition, which noted that, Whichard had served in both the legislative and judicial branches of government, “and in so doing, he has the distinction of being the only person to serve in both the House of Representatives and the Senate in the North Carolina General Assembly and on both of our appellate courts, the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court of North Carolina. In each of these significant areas of service, Willis Whichard has established records of lasting import.”
Born in 1940 in Durham, Whichard was an adjunct law professor at UNC from 1986 until 1999. He was dean and law professor at Campbell University from 1999 until his retirement in 2006.
From 2006 to 2013, Whichard practiced as a partner with the Moore & Van Allen law firm’s Research Triangle Park office.
In 2013, Whichard joined the Chapel Hill law firm, Tillman, Whichard, and Cagle.
In 2019, Whichard and Raleigh attorney Scott Miskimon were presented Friend of the Court awards for their service to the Judicial Branch and work on the Supreme Court’s bicentennial exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of History. Whichard led the effort to create the North Carolina Supreme Court exhibit, “Law and Justice: The Supreme Court of North Carolina, 1819-2019.”
