Lawyer Could-Have-Beens

The VLW Quick 10: Judges’ Nicknames

By Alan Cooper
Published: September 4, 2009

Nicknames that sounded good when you were 15 may not work as well when you’re 25 and may well be used by only your oldest and closest friends when other folks more often address you as, “Your honor.” Match this list of 10 current or former Virginia judges with their nicknames. There are only nine [...]

The VLW Quick 10: Cases about food

By Peter Vieth
Published: August 28, 2009

You eat every day, contemplating only digestion, not litigation. Yet there has been a steady stream of lawsuits over food since the earliest reported cases. Here are a few of more recent vintage, all from Virginia: 1. Buckshot in the ham. Maybe the quail hunt strayed too close to the barnyard, but a 1965 Virginia [...]

VLW Quick 10: Closing Arguments in the Movies

By Deborah Elkins
Published: August 17, 2009

Litigators say that trying a case means telling a story. Lots of lawyer movies follow a narrative arc up to a climactic closing argument. Some of the summations in this list of flicks caused fireworks, some landed with a thud. Members of the academy, you may cast your votes. Frank Galvin in “The Verdict” (1982 [...]

The VLW Quick 10: Reasons to Strike Jurors (that have survived Batson)

By Deborah Elkins
Published: August 5, 2009

U.S. v. Batson and the cases that have followed that decision say that a lawyer can’t strike a potential juror based on race or gender. What reasons can a lawyer use? Here are 10 that worked in Virginia, taken from the pages of our paper: 1. INATTENTIVENESS. A juror was “looking all around the courtroom, [...]