Meet the Court of Appeals Judge

Staff Reports

Judge Wanda G. Bryant has served on the North Carolina Court of Appeals since 2001. She brings almost thirty years of experience and public service in the legal profession and the community to the state’s second-highest court, where she is fourth in seniority among its 15 members. A North Carolina native, Judge Bryant is often lauded for her fairness, integrity, strong work ethic, and her common-sense approach to work and life learned in her close-knit community in Brunswick County.

Judge Bryant is a native of Southport, North Carolina. A product of Brunswick County public schools, Judge Bryant also attended the Governor’s School for the gifted and talented at the North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem.

A first-generation college graduate, Judge Bryant received a Bachelor of Arts degree at Duke University in 1977 after just three years. As an Angier B. Duke Scholar, she was able to study for a summer at Oxford University in England. She received her Juris Doctor at N.C. Central University School of Law in Durham.

After leaving NCCU, Judge Bryant began her legal career and made history when she was appointed the first female and first African American prosecutor of the thirteenth prosecutorial district of North Carolina, in 1983. In 1987 she became the first staff attorney for the Police Executive Research Forum in Washington, D.C.

In 1989 she became an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Department of Justice in the District of Columbia. She then returned to North Carolina where she served the next eight years as a Senior Deputy Attorney General and the first director of the newly established Citizen’s Rights Division of the North Carolina Department of Justice, until being appointed by Governor Mike Easley to the N.C. Court of Appeals in 2001.