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.

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.

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.

Attorney Chandra Taylor-Sawyer sits down with Sonya and Maggie to unpack environmental justice: what it actually means, why it benefits everyone, and why resilience is at the heart of it. A candid conversation about the laws and policies shaping our environment.

Attorney Mavis Gragg joins Sonya and Maggie to talk heirs' property — what it is, why families lose land over it, and why "just get a will" isn't the fix everyone thinks it is. A personal, honest conversation about law, land, and what we leave behind.

Immigration law is moving faster than the headlines can keep up. We sit down with two attorneys working at different points in the system: Meghan Deutsch-Blanco and Heather Crews. Together, they walk us through what immigration practice actually looks like right now — the cases on their desks, the policy whiplash, the parts of the system most Americans never see, and the human stakes behind every filing.

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?