Publisher's Notebook

John Charles Thomas recently retired from the Supreme Court of Virginia.

Wait a minute. Thomas hasn’t been on the court since 1989, you say.

That’s true. In 1983, at age 32, Thomas became the first African-American to sit on the court. He resigned in 1989 due to a brain tumor, and after receiving treatment, rejoined Hunton & Williams, where he is a senior partner.

But apparently one can’t formally retire from the court until the age of 60, which Thomas reached in September. He said that now he actually could be recalled, as a retired justice, to sit on a panel.

In the meantime, he’ll stay busy with his work at Hunton – and at Juridical Solutions. He recently signed on as a senior professional with that mediation company.

The General Assembly won’t return to Richmond until January, but the annual exercise in minting new specialty license plates is in gear already.

Virginia must have more specialty/vanity tags than just about any other state in the country. And for members of the General Assembly, specialty plates must be a constituent service bonanza, or an annoyance. Or both.

Here’s how it works: A well-meaning group with an interest, cause or passion wants a specialty license plate to share that enthusiasm with the world. A friendly legislator introduces a bill to authorize that plate. The measure has to pass the Assembly, and once it’s actually approved, 350 people have to submit a prepaid application before it will be produced. If all that happens, you’ll be seeing the new plate on cars not long thereafter.

A lot of plates never make it. A lot do. For example, you can get a Jimmy Buffett parrothead plate, plates for a variety of Washington-area sports teams or tags for a number of colleges.

If you like politics on your car’s tag, you can “Choose Life” or “Trust Women/Respect Choice.” You can get a Confederate heritage license plate. Or “Tobacco Heritage,” which is much more genteel than a bumper sticker that reads, “I smoke and I vote.”

There are a few license tag bills already in the hopper for the 2011 Assembly, carried over from this year. These include plates for backers of Relay for Life and Friends of the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Del. Richard P. Bell, R-Staunton, with House Bill 1408, is trying again to get the national motto, “In God We Trust,” on a license plate.

Here’s something new.

Del. John O’Bannon, R-Henrico, has introduced House Bill 1418, which would create a plate with a recreation of the famous “Don’t Tread on Me” flag from revolutionary times. The bill doesn’t say it, but this plate is a nod to the Tea Party movement, which has been using the snake flag, also known as the Gadsden flag, as one of its rallying symbols.

While the Virginia snake-flag plate effort appears to be the first, Tea Party conservatives aren’t stopping in Virginia. The Dallas News reported that Texas is also mulling a “Don’t Tread on Me” tag.

Once Virginia and Texas started the movement, a legislator in Nevada jumped on board the bandwagon, according to the Las Vegas Sun. That leaves 47 states to be heard from.

Considering that specialty plates require payment of an additional fee, more than one left-leaning blogger has noted there’s a small irony at work here: Tea Party members never have seemed so willing to write the government a check.

Richmond lawyer Andy Reinhardt was in Miami last week.

But it was hardly for a vacation. Reinhardt (right) is the new president of the Workers’ Injury Law and Advocacy Group, known as WILG (pronounced will-ig). The group held its national conference in South Florida Nov. 12-13.

WILG is a national bar group for workers’ compensation attorneys. Founded in 1995, it now has about 800 members in all 50 states.

Its mission, Reinhardt said, is simple: To help injured workers and to advocate on their behalf.

Although workers’ comp tends to be a state-oriented system across the country, WILG leaders have found themselves appearing before Congress recently, he said, seeking to educate legislators about their mission.

Reinhardt said he expects to be on the road to DC during his one-year term, and to appear before state legislatures to argue and lobby for and against legislation. Other travel will take him to meet with WILG members and groups across the country. He said he already has his first flight booked, heading to Denver for a meeting of trial-lawyer association presidents later this month.

The group also hosts CLE for its members and maintains a listserv. Reinhardt said that WILG members often are active in the workers’ comp section of the American Association for Justice, the national plaintiffs’ bar, and in state groups such as the Virginia Trial Lawyers Association.

But the leaders in comp work opted to start their own group 15 years ago, and WILG is, he said, “an organization whose time has come.”

Reinhardt said that he had heard that it takes about 10 years for a group like this to take off, and WILG now “has crossed that threshold.”

The group hired a new executive director, Jennifer Comer, in January and started a new website this year (www.WILG.org).

Coming from a small firm and knowing what it will take to lead an up-and-coming group this year, Reinhardt hailed the strong support of his law partner, Stephen Harper, and his “patient and loving” wife of 24 years, Monet.

“If you print that kind of thing, I’d like to thank them,” he said. Sometimes we do.

What’s worse than a pair of high-testosterone lawyers trash-talking at each other over minutiae at a deposition?

That’s bad, for sure. A pair of college professors sniping at each other at a department meeting? (Someone once said the politics in academia were so nasty because the stakes were so low).

That’s bad, too. How about one newspaper’s response when it gets to write smack about another newspaper, especially the other paper’s editors?

Just as bad. It happened this week. Guy who is the local news editor of the Brockton (Mass.) Enterprise was pulled over by cops last Saturday with a blood alcohol content of 0.3 percent, and charged with his third DUI. A bad situation, made worse over the fact that the cops say they found an open bottle of vodka in a bag in the car. Oh, and the guy’s son, age 6, was in the back seat.

All of this was reported on the Web site of a sister paper, The Patriot Ledger, rather matter-of-factly on Monday. They identified the guy’s employer in the third paragraph. The headline: “Police: Man driving with child in car was drunk.”

The Enterprise posted the Patriot Ledger’s story on its own Web site Tuesday.

Enter the rival. The Boston Herald gets hold of the story (I’m guessing they have someone who scans the sites of competitor papers) and in a piece published Tuesday, blares the headline, “Brockton editor bagged with booze, kid in car.”

The Herald probably had their best wordsmiths working on this lead:

“With his 6-year-old son munching a burger in the back seat and a half-empty liter of cheap vodka riding shotgun up front, a Brockton Enterprise editor allegedly wasted behind the wheel didn’t even know what town he was in, police said.”

They should have used purple ink. The image of a bottle of vodka (note it was “cheap”) “riding shotgun” is pretty evocative. And I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen “allegedly wasted” used in a news story before.

One wonders what the Brockton Enterprise will do when/if it gets the chance to return the favor to the Herald.

Philip Morris USA, the tobacco giant owned by Richmond-based Altria Group Inc., is on the warpath against counterfeiters, according to the Associated Press.

Marlboro cigarette counterfeiters, that is. Kind of gives a whole new meaning to the old phrase, “Smokin’ O.P.s” (as in other people’s).

Philip Morris just filed federal lawsuits against eight New York and New Jersey retailers that allegedly sold counterfeit Marlboros. That brings the total of lawsuits the company has filed over fake smokes in that region to 35.

Why would cigarette smugglers look to the Big Apple?

Well, New York is potentially Fake Marlboro Country because of the high federal, state and local taxes on tobacco products.

A pack of cigarettes in New York City can cost more than 10 bucks. Might to cheaper and easier to quit…

The College of Knowledge is looking for a new mascot, as I reported earlier this week.

But Judge Lou Campbell from Botetourt County kicked me a note, reminding me that a few years ago, Prof. George Grayson of the William & Mary government department issued a modest proposal that would have resolved the controversy of the day: What to do with the two feathers on the W&M “Tribe” logo.

A quick recap: The NCAA was leaning on any member school with a logo or nickname that was deemed offensive to Native Americans. Years ago, the W&M teams were known as “the Indians.” The name was chosen to honor the early link between the college and the nearby tribes. The Brafferton Building, one of the original structures in the W&M front campus, was built as an Indian school in 1723. Sometime later, the school adopted “The Tribe” as its team name.

The University of North Dakota and Florida State University successfully cited history and local tribe support to the NCAA to keep their names, the “Fighting Sioux” and the “Seminoles,” respectively.

Down in Williamsburg, W&M tucked it tail feathers between its legs, thanks to then-President Gene Nichol, and plucked the green and gold feathers from the logo. W&M adopted a logo that looks a lot like the one you’ll see on garbage trucks owned by a local waste management company, but that’s another story.

Back to Grayson: One of the five proposed mascots up for consideration is a wren. In his op-ed piece, as a way to resolve the feather controversy, Grayson proposed that the school change its team name to the William and Mary Wrens.

The wren was considered “the king of birds” in medieval Europe, Grayson wrote. He added, “These bold and resourceful creatures with their perky tail-feathers are avid insectivores. This would enable W&M to devour the mushy Spiders of the University of Richmond.” Hear, hear.

The historic Wren Building? Grayson said that it “logically would become the new nesting place for the Athletic Department” once the Wrens ruled the roost on campus.

Here’s guessing we can count on the good professor for at least one vote for the wren as mascot.

Josh Saviano, then and now

How about people who did something else first, then turned to Law as a Second Career?

First up in this new category is Josh Saviano, a former child actor from in the TV series “The Wonder Years,” set in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Saviano played Paul Pfieffer, best friend of Kevin Arnold, portrayed by Fred Savage. Saviano was 11 when the series debuted in 1988, and he and Savage essentially grew up on-screen. The show concluded in 1993.

Saviano later attended Yale and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York. He is currently an associate with the firm of Morrison Cohen LLP, where he practices corporate and IP law.

And who says life doesn’t mirror art? In the last episode of “The Wonder Years,” a grown-up Kevin recounts what happened to all the characters. Paul Pfeiffer, he reveals, ended up going to Harvard Law and was a successful attorney.

E-mail. I get a lot of it. Some good, some junk.

Sometimes it’s a press release touting some new product that lawyers can’t do without (the good ones go to our ad department for prospecting…others get the delete key).

And sometimes it’s a press release for a seminar. For the most part, these get the boot, too. Then there are those that raise vital legal issues of our day and deserve due attention.  Take for example, the invite I got this morning to a conference on “Wine Law in America.” It will be held next month at the Fairmont Mission Inn and Spa in Sonoma, Calif., a town I have visited twice and know for a fact is pretty close to heaven on this earth.

The conference will cover “Intellectual Property in the Wine Business” and “Understanding Entitlements and Regulatory Costs and Timelines” for the wine industry. There’s also a session on “How to Get Into the Wine Business.” Maybe, I daydreamed, someone needed to go and get the skinny in Sonoma.

The invite urgently noted that there’s only one seat left. Just as I was thinking maybe I needed to call my own number for this one, I checked the date: It’s the same weekend at the VBA meeting at The Homestead.

Okay, the Virginia mountains are pretty close to heaven, too.