Special to Iredell Free News

Rob Young has announced that he will seek a second term as a District Court judge in Judicial District 22A, which includes Iredell and Alexander counties.

Elected in 2020, Young is currently in his third year of a four-year term, which ends December 31, 2024. He intends to file his campaign paperwork with the N.C. Board of Elections when judicial filing begins for the next election cycle in December 2023.

A Republican, Young ran in 2020 as a reform candidate, seeking to bring substantial changes to the court system. Among the reforms he sought to introduce were increasing the availability of drug treatment in the judicial district and helping to decrease case backlogs.

Throughout his first term, Young has worked toward these goals by maintaining a policy of requiring substance abuse assessments and recommended treatment for criminal defendants involved with substance abuse issues. He has remained involved with the Iredell County Drug and Alcohol Coalition (DACI) and has worked with Alexander County officials to develop the infrastructure for a drug treatment court.

Additionally, Young has worked to help decrease civil case loads, particularly in family law and juvenile cases that require multiple court dates for resolution. 

“I make it a point to arrive at 8 a.m. and leave only when the work in court is done,” Young said. “It has been my goal to be a presence in whatever courthouse I am assigned to be available to attorneys and their clients or individual litigants, many of whom are seeking protection in domestic violence cases and, for safety reasons, urgently need to have their cases heard.”

Prior to being elected, Young worked as a trial attorney in private practice for five years and a county government attorney for over 20 years. He handled cases in state and federal courts and maintained an extensive appellate practice, arguing before the North Carolina Court of Appeals and in the North Carolina Supreme Court.

His extensive experience in the courtroom has helped him manage multiple trials in civil and criminal court in the course of a typical week. His experience as a child welfare attorney and as the author of two legal treatises in the area of juvenile law has also helped him navigate child welfare cases involving abused and neglected children and juvenile delinquency cases.

”Sometimes my orders in cases can be voluminous, sometimes 25 pages or more. I believe our appellate courts require District Court judges to be proper fact finders but also to properly apply the law,” Young explained. “My opinions may be long, they may be full of legal citations, I might not even be right, but it is hard for anyone to say that they don’t know how I came to a particular decision.”