UNC Chapel Hill's long-anticipated Carolina North project just had a false start.

The massive project on the Horace Williams property north of the main campus appears to be stalling out a bit. As Jesse DeConto reports in today's News & Observer, a deal to build a tech-transfer incubator there, the first project for the new campus, is off.

The university has not been able to come to terms with Alexandria Real Estate Properties, the private firm it has been working with to develop an Innovation Center for the new campus.

Thanks, lousy economy.

The weak economy has also put the UNC School of Law's move to the new campus on hold, DeConto reports.

Applicants to UNC's law school recently got some good luck - prematurely and, in many cases, incorrectly.

Thanks to a computer glitch, the law school's admissions office recently e-mailed about 250 people, inviting them to events for newly-admitted students.

Problem was, that invitation was sent to the wrong e-mail list. The 250 applicants who received the invitation on March 18 had not yet heard whether they had been admitted, because their files were still under review.

The e-mail was supposed to have gone to another group, also of about 250 students, who had already been admitted.

The mistake was discovered within 15 minutes and a follow-up message was quickly sent out, said Michael States, the law school's assistant dean for admissions.

States said most folks who received the mistaken email weren't bothered by it. Some figured it was a mistake because they had not yet received an admissions decision. 

"Most of the people were wonderful about it," States said. "One person said it was the second time it happened to him that day. I didn't ask what the other school was."

But it did cause some rumblings on at least one law school message board where some applicants wrote about their confusion.

Wrote one: "Way to ruin my day, UNC."

On the bright side, UNC-CH didn't do what the University of California-San Diego just did by mistake. UCSD this week accidentally offered admission to all 46,000 of its applicants.

That's 29,000 more students than it wants to enroll. 

Law school students at UNC are providing free income tax preparation for Orange County residents.
All volunteers are IRS-certified, and returns are filed electronically.

Residents are eligible if they make less than $50,000 a year, are not self-employed, receive no rental income, and have a valid Social Security or Individual Taxpayer Identification number.

The sessions will be held at the law school on Ridge Road and at the Chapel Hill Women's Center.

For more info, click here.

Law school students at UNC are providing free income tax preparation for Orange County residents.
All volunteers are IRS-certified, and returns are filed electronically.

Residents are eligible if they make less than $50,000 a year, are not self-employed, receive no rental income, and have a valid Social Security or Individual Taxpayer Identification number.

The sessions will be held at the law school on Ridge Road and at the Chapel Hill Women's Center.

For more info, click here.

Eventually, UNC Chapel Hill's law school will relocate to Carolina North, the long-discussed, 50-year plan to bring a new campus to town.

When it does, departments on UNC-CH's main campus will have a rare opportunity to move things around and create what planners expect to be a social sciences cluster in that building.

 Read more here.

A team of students from the UNC Chapel Hill School of Law was honored recently for its pro bono work
helping victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

Since the devastating storm of fall 2005, teams of 10 to 15 UNC law students have spent their spring and winter breaks in New Orleans, working with people there.

The students chronicled their adventures on this blog. 

The poverty center at the UNC School of Law that opened in 2005 under the direction of former presidential candidate John Edwards now has a new leader.

It is Gene Nichol, the former law school dean who left Chapel Hill in 2005 for the presidency of the College of William & Mary. Nichol had a rocky tenure there, resigned abruptly earlier this year and returned to teach at UNC.  

UNC's law school created the Center for Poverty, Work and Opportunity specifically for Edwards, who subsequently used poverty as a key issue in his failed bid for the presidency.

He wasn't involved with the UNC center for too long, stepping down from the post in 2006.

Professor Marion Crain took over as the center's director but left Chapel Hill earlier this year for a position on the law faculty at Washington University in St. Louis.

Of Nichol, current law school dean Jack Boger said:

"He is a remarkable scholar and an energetic leader who cares deeply about issues of fairness and equality. I expect his leadership to fortify the center's efforts."

Most of the phone calls Molly Maynard fielded this morning as a voting hotline operator were of the mundane variety: folks who went to the wrong polling place or didn't realize they had registered incorrectly.

But then there was that woman who had just moved to North Carolina from New York and registered to vote - or so she thought - on a website. For a fee.

"They charged her for it; she thought she was registered to vote and she couldn't," recounted Maynard, a first-year law student at UNC Chapel Hill. "They only charged her 11 dollars so it's not like they were in it for the money. They just didn't want her to vote., or at least that's what it seemed like."

Voters with questions on election day can call a toll-free hotline staffed by faculty and students from the UNC Chapel Hill School of Law.

The non-partisan hotline will be staffed between 6:30 a.m. and 7:30 p.m. on election day, Nov. 4. The hotline is part of Election Protection, a national voter advocacy effort.

In North Carolina, voters can call 1-866-OUR-VOTE (866-687-8683). Assistance will be available in English and Spanish.