Publisher's Notebook

It’s almost graduation time at Virginia’s eight law schools. They will turn out students who have been trained as lawyers (they’re not yet attorneys – you get that title once you pass a bar exam).

You have to wonder what will happen in Charlottesville.

Will there be a protest at the University of Virginia law commencement to build on last month’s law-placement rhubarb? In March at the U.Va. law school, there was a student protest effort. A group of law students was unhappy that they spent three years of their lives and a lot of money and now they don’t have jobs waiting for them. During the weekend when admitted prospective students were visiting, the protesters walked around wearing T-shirts that said, “Virginia Law – $40,000 a year and NO JOB.” They blamed the administration, apparently, for overselling their employment prospects.

These are students who started law school in the fall of 2008, just when the economy began cratering. Three years at a safe haven are better than three years in the unemployment line, which is where some of their college colleagues probably have been.

Watch to see if there is some grand gesture at the U.Va. festivities, or whether the speaker, U.S Attorney General Eric Holder, says anything about the flap.

Up at the University of Michigan law school, officials likely are holding their collective breath until graduation comes and goes. Their scheduled speaker for “Senior Day,” their equivalent of commencement, is an alumnus, Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio and UM Law Class of ’84. However, the invitation to Portman sparked a student protest petition, asking Dean Evan Caminker to disinvite the senator. The protesters object to Portman’s views on gay rights (he has consistently voted against measures to enhance them). The dean recently reiterated his support for the invitation, saying the school does not want to be associated with “ideological censorship.”

Caminker, in settling the Portman invitation matter, said that UM’s Senior Day should be “a day of celebration and not controversy…I am deeply distressed that the celebratory mood will be dampened.”

Caminker is right – graduation is, and should be, a happy and optimistic time. Even if the economy and job market aren’t where we all want them to be. Memo to any potential protesters at U.Va.: Many of your classmates, not to mention their families who paid that $40K a year, will be looking to mark a grand accomplishment, not to listen to petulance.

All the speakers at the state’s law commencements (see item in the VLW Blog) no doubt will offer well-earned congratulations and urge the new grads to go off and do good works. That’s standard fare and appropriate. The mission for all graduation speakers everywhere is to check the bromides at the door and to say something new and even memorable.

At my graduation in 1979 from the College of Knowledge down in Williamsburg, the featured speaker was Jeff MacNelly, the Pulitzer-winning editorial cartoonist and creator of “Shoe,” possibly the best comic strip ever.

MacNelly had three bits of advice:
1. Find a job you like.
2. Work like hell.
3. Keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.

Words to heed from Grundy to Charlottesville to Fairfax to Virginia Beach and all points in between.

Spring has sprung, and the annual battle between two big-box home improvement stores is under way.

The stakes are these: Lowe’s and Home Depot both sell a lot of flowering plants, and a lot of gardening paraphenalia. The companies spend big bucks to develop new strains of “exclusive” flowers to appeal to the gardening public.

The Wall Street Journal has the headline of the day for its story on this fight:

“The Garden Gloves Come Off”

You want to start a marketing campaign for your law practice that focuses on email.

You know that Virginia’s spam laws are pretty strict and you don’t want to end up blacklisted or a permanent resident of everyone’s spam box.

How do you negotiate the laws and regs that cover your proposal?

There’s a class for that.

It’s from the University of Virginia’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies. The class, entitled “Legal Aspects of eMarketing,” is held online one night a week from July 19 to Sept. 27.

The course is one of the offerings from U.Va.’s online graduate certificate program in emarketing. Registration is now open. Further details are available at the U.Va. SCPS site.

The class will cover how the Internet faces pressure from consumer groups and government regulators, and it will examine trends in emarketing laws and regulations, as well as techniques to comply with same. Some of the material to be covered includes recent court cases and final actions by regulatory agencies.

David O. Ward, a senior legal advisor at the Federal Communications Commission, teaches the course.

The historic Hotel John Marshall in downtown Richmond closed its doors in 1988.

A landmark on the Richmond skyline since it opened in 1929, a generation of lawyers will remember their bar swearing-in there. It’s been closed for years, but lately it’s been getting a makeover on its way to being an apartment building.

Here’s some history in the making. This morning, the grand old hotel started getting new letters for its distinctive sign.

Photo by Alan Cooper, who has a much better view of the sign from his desk than I have (mine being no view at all…)

Fairfax Circuit Judge Jane Roush and Abingdon lawyer Mary Lynn Tate provided a “Tort Law Update” on recent cases from the Supreme Court of Virginia at the Virginia Trial Lawyers Association convention on April 2.
In particular, they commended the audience to review a January 2011 case, CNH America LLC v. Smith. It provides a “mini-treatise” on the law governing expert testimony, they said.

The case was a products liability suit involving a lawn mower, and the controversy centered around two experts for the plaintiff. On cross-examination, they admitted that they did not know this or that and that they hadn’t examined the mower hose that had failed.

In short, the trial judge observed, “they’re just barely experts, maybe . . . but’s that all they have to be.”

And that’s not wrong, Roush and Tate said. So long as the expert knows more than the trier of fact and can provide information to help in a decision, he can testify. But after the high court reversed in the CNH case, the expert’s opinion now needs to have some foundation behind it, they noted.

And while speaking of barely there experts, Roush said she remembered that back in law school at U.Va., she had a professor who had joked there was a different way to define expert: “Anybody who comes from out of town.”

Supreme Court Justice Bill Mims celebrated exactly one year on the job last Friday with a talk to the Virginia Trial Lawyers Association entitled, “Reflections from the End of the Bench: Musings of a Rookie Justice.”

Mims will graduate to veteran very shortly: Either the General Assembly or the governor will be adding two new justices to fill two vacancies. Mims will jump to fifth in seniority on a seven-member court.

Mims came to the court after a career as a practicing lawyer, as a member of both the House of Delegates and the Senate, and as Attorney General. He said he agrees with a statement made by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel E. Alito: “Judging is not an academic pursuit; it is a practical activity.”

Mims observed that the Virginia high court isn’t known for having very many dissents or concurrences. The court generally speaks with one voice.

Of 74 cases during his first year on the court, Mims said there were only eight dissents with no discernible pattern. And there were just six concurrences.

Of those six concurrences, five were filed by … the rookie justice himself.

Mims said his daughter, a first-year student at the University of Virginia law school, apprised him that he better quit that.

She cut to the chase and said, “No one is known at the Great Concurrer.”