The next fight is taking Orange County commissioner, civil rights attorney to Florida

Orange County Commissioner and civil rights attorney Mark Dorosin will be leaving North Carolina this summer to join the faculty at Florida A&M University College of Law in Orlando.

Dorosin announced the move Wednesday night in a Facebook post. His new job with Florida A&M, one of the last historically Black law schools in the country, will be as an associate professor and director of clinical programs.

“Although I am filled with sadness about leaving North Carolina, I am excited by the opportunity to help raise up an army of young civil rights lawyers to continue the struggle for racial justice,” he said. “Leaving this community and all the people we love here is one of the hardest decisions me and Bronwyn have ever made.”

His last day as a commissioner is July 31, board Chair Renee Price said in an email Thursday.

Dorosin has “added an interesting voice to the board,” said Price, who cited his work on issues in the historically Black Rogers Road neighborhood in Chapel Hill.

“I say this in a friendly, very heartfelt way, (he’s been) a bit of an agitator,” she said. “We had similar thoughts, so it was good to think that on some issues, I had an ally. When it comes to social justice ... I think we all have been working on social justice and civil rights.”

Filling commissioners vacancy

Dorosin is one of two Orange County commissioners representing District 1, which includes Chapel Hill and Carrboro. He was first elected to the seat in 2012, and re-elected in 2016 and 2020. His current term expires in December 2024.

The process for replacing him is expected to start with the Orange County Democratic Party’s Executive Committee, which will consider potential replacements, because Dorosin was a Democratic nominee in 2020. The party could recommend one or multiple candidates to the board.

County Attorney John Roberts, in a memo to the commissioners Thursday, said the commissioners also can choose to appoint a subcommittee to accept and review applicants in consultation with the Democratic Party.

State law gives the county commissioners 60 days after Dorosin leaves to appoint a replacement. The person chosen, who also must live in District 1, will serve until 2022, when a new commissioner is elected to fill the seat for the remaining two years.

The last time the commissioners had to appoint someone to fill a vacancy on the board was in 1981, Price said.

County records show Shirley Marshall was appointed that year to replace Commissioner Anne Barnes, whom then-Gov. Jim Hunt appointed to fill the seat vacated by N.C. State Rep. Patricia Stanford Hunt, whom Gov. Hunt had appointed to be a judge, according to an interview recorded by UNC’s Southern Oral History Program.

Law, business, political fights

In the past 25 years, Dorosin also has taught at UNC, where he graduated from the School of Law in 1994, and at Duke University and Alamance Community College. He and his wife, Bronwyn Merritt, also owned and managed Hell, a nightclub in downtown Chapel Hill, for 10 years, and he previously practiced law with the Chapel Hill law firm McSurely, Dorosin & Osment.

Merritt, who is an artist and real estate broker with Carrboro Realty, and their three children also will move to Florida.

Dorosin acknowledged in his post that Florida, which is politically diverse but has become more conservative in the last decade, could be a challenge. The News & Observer’s efforts to reach Dorosin on Facebook and by phone Thursday were not successful.

“Where better to put one’s shoulder to the wheel?” he asked, noting, “And it’s not like North Carolina hasn’t broken our hearts repeatedly over the last 30 years.”

Dorosin has not been shy in his criticism of UNC’s governing bodies and state government, whether the issue was voting rights, school vouchers, racial justice or Orange County’s impact fees, which were singled out for revocation by the General Assembly in 2017.

Dorosin, who was the board’s chairman at the time, characterized the move as “a crass political calculation.”

He also has taken on big opponents in his professional life, most notably in 2017, when the UNC Board of Governors terminated his job with the UNC Center for Civil Rights and banned the nonprofit center from pursuing legal cases on behalf of poor and minority clients.

The debate about the center’s future made it impossible to raise the private money that paid its bills, Dorosin said at the time.

“It was a pretty devastating blow, mostly because it was a concrete realization of the state of this center and for the work that it’s done ... and for the legacy of Julius Chambers,” Dorosin said of his termination letter. “It was not unexpected, but it was really a grim coda to what we’ve been through with the Board of Governors over the last year.”

He and attorney Elizabeth Haddix, whose job was also terminated, then formed the Julius L. Chambers Center for Civil Rights, a nonprofit law firm serving low-income communities. The center has since merged with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Dorosin is the managing attorney for the group’s N.C. regional office.