After graduating from law school, Martin served as a judicial law clerk to United States District Judge
Clyde H. Hamilton. Following his clerkship, Martin practiced law at the McNair Law Firm in
Raleigh, North Carolina. He then served as Legal Counsel to
James G. Martin, the
Governor of North Carolina, until his appointment in 1992 as Resident Superior Court Judge in
Pitt County, North Carolina. From 1994 to 1999, Martin served as a Judge on the North Carolina Court of Appeals. He began serving as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of North Carolina in January 1999 and became the Senior Associate Justice in February 2006. He became re-elected to an eight-year term in
November 2006. , 2017 In August 2014, North Carolina
Governor Pat McCrory announced he would appoint Justice Martin as Chief Justice of the State Supreme Court. The appointment came as former Chief Justice
Sarah Parker reached the state's mandatory retirement age of 72. Martin then won his bid for a full term as chief justice on
November 4, 2014. Martin has served on the adjunct faculty at
Duke University School of Law,
University of North Carolina School of Law, and
North Carolina Central University School of Law. On January 25, 2019, Martin announced that he would retire from the
North Carolina Supreme Court in February 2019.
Governor Roy Cooper appointed Associate Justice Cheri Beasley as Martin’s successor. Martin took on a new role as Dean of the
Regent University School of Law in Virginia Beach, Virginia, with this role becoming effective on March 1, 2019. In 2022, it was announced that he would be leaving Regent University to become the founding Dean of a new law school at
High Point University. In early January 2021, it was reported that Martin had participated in the
attempts to overturn the
2020 presidential election during President
Donald Trump's last efforts to stay in power before the
certification of
Joe Biden's
Electoral College victory by telling the President that Vice President
Mike Pence had the constitutional authority to block the certification by rejecting the Electoral College votes from multiple states. Pence ultimately did not accept Martin's argument, instead certifying Biden as the winner of the election. In October 2024,
The Intercept reported that Martin was also involved in helping to develop a lawsuit, based on the
independent state legislature theory that each state legislature has absolute authority to choose presidential electors regardless of a state's laws or constitution, that Republican state attorneys could file directly to the
US Supreme Court. In December 2020, Texas Attorney General
Ken Paxton filed the suit,
Texas v. Pennsylvania, which the Supreme Court declined to hear. ==Professional involvement==