Right for Any (Raised) Reason?

Normally, an appellate court will “limit appellate review to issues raised by the parties because those legal issues are joined after full adversarial briefing.” The Supreme Court of North Carolina has cautioned that “[a]ddressing issues that the parties never raised, preserved, and asserted on appeal is harmful for several reasons.” One of those reasons is the “party presentation principle”: parties—not judges—are usually tasked with defining the issues, claims, defenses, and arguments in an adversarial legal system. At the same time, an appellate court can generally affirm a lower court’s de