Posted in Supreme Court Opinions on Jan 13th, 2012
University of Virginia law Prof. Kent Sinclair has been the Virginia Supreme Court’s official reporter of decisions for nearly three decades, but he gets no acknowledgement of that title in the court’s official ruling in his battle against a cell phone tower. Sinclair gets a win, however. In a five-to-two decision, the court found that [...]
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Posted in Supreme Court Opinions on Nov 4th, 2011
The Supreme Court offers no remedy for a patient whose lawsuit against a Richmond hospital was dismissed because her out-of-state lawyer was derelict in expert disclosures. The high court ruled Richmond Circuit Judge Walter Stout was within his discretion to toss the case after the out-of-state lawyer failed to get local counsel’s signature on a [...]
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Posted in Supreme Court Opinions on Nov 4th, 2011
The Supreme Court of Virginia says the state Constitution does not forbid the use of state money to build a rail-to-truck cargo transfer facility in Montgomery County. By helping to move traffic from highways to the rails, the state is effectively buying additional capacity for Interstate 81, the court reasoned. The decision allows construction of [...]
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Posted in Supreme Court Opinions on Apr 21st, 2011
A contractor who was locked up and falsely portrayed as potential child molester gets to try his defamation case against the police officer who had him arrested. Michael Lewis was working in a Prince George County neighborhood when a 10-year-old boy asked if Lewis could give him a ride home. When Lewis agreed, the boy [...]
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Posted in Supreme Court Opinions on Apr 21st, 2011
On April 21, the Virginia Supreme Court affirmed dismissal of a law firm’s complaint that U.S. Rep. Gerry Connolly – as then-chair of the Fairfax supervisors – torpedoed the firm’s longstanding relationship with the county housing authority. Connolly (D, VA-11) had publicly argued with a lawyer at the Fairfax firm of Dunn, McCormack & MacPherson because the firm [...]
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Posted in Supreme Court Opinions on Apr 21st, 2011
The Supreme Court of Virginia has revived a $9-million lawsuit against the city of Lexington for the 2006 drowning of a 16-year-old boy. The lawsuit claimed the city failed to warn about dangerous water currents below a dam in a public park. The trial judge struck the negligence claims in 2009, ruling the dam’s danger [...]
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An opinion day ritual at the Supreme Court of Virginia has ended. Attorneys who had had their case decided would gather in the fifth floor clerk’s office shortly before 9:30 and join messengers and a journalist or two to wait for printed copies of opinions. Many of the attorneys had been in the courtroom to [...]
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Although a nurse who assisted a now-deceased doctor in a difficult delivery might have had an interest in avoiding her own liability for the baby’s birth injuries, her testimony is not barred under the dead man’s statute because it failed to address the fundamental liability issue in the case, the Supreme Court of Virginia held [...]
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The Supreme Court of Virginia issued an unpublished order today in Nageotte v. Board of Supervisors of Stafford County, in addition to deciding 19 cases by opinion, 12 of them criminal decisions. A list of the cases and a summary of the holdings is here. Because you won’t find Nageotte there and may need only [...]
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Noting the right to a jury trial is “sacred” under the Virginia Constitution, the Supreme Court of Virginia has affirmed a $5-million jury verdict for a worker injured at a Portsmouth shipyard. The case now has produced two Virginia Supreme Court opinions sure to warm the hearts of the plaintiffs’ bar. The first, in 2008, [...]
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