The Role of the Courts
		The Mission Statement of the North Carolina Judicial Branch is “To protect and preserve the rights and liberties of all the people, as guaranteed by the Constitutions and laws of the United States and North Carolina, by providing a fair, independent, and accessible forum for the just, timely, and economical resolution of their legal affairs.” Courts decide actual cases involving real people. The courts do not decide cases about general abstract ideas or questions. In criminal cases, the courts decide whether the State's criminal laws were broken. In civil cases, they resolve private disputes between individuals or companies. In both types of cases, there is a conflict. Often the parties in the case do not ask to be in court. What happens in court and how they are treated matters to them.