The VLW Blog

A lawyer who called herself “Madame Justice” when she ran unsuccessfully for the North Carolina Supreme Court has been hit with a public reprimand from the state bar in N.C. Rachel Lea Hunter is an associate at a Durham law firm, but her campaign Web site reveals her flamboyant political side. The Web site used [...]

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McGuireWoods LLP will get a London presence by absorbing the 36-lawyer firm of Grundberg Mocatta Rakison LLP on May 1. “This is a great day in the history of McGuirewoods,” said McGuireWoods Chairman Richard Cullen. He said the firm has sought for some time to expand its overseas reach with a London office. McGuireWoods has [...]

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A hotel employee is being sought after allegedly shooting two co-workers to death at The Homestead resort. An arrest warrant for capital murder has been issued for Beacher F. Hackney of Covington, reports The Roanoke Times. Hackney is a steward in the resort’s main kitchen, where authorities believe he used a .380-caliber semiautomatic pistol to [...]

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A house at Smith Mountain Lake owned by a former educator accused of killing his wife has burned to the ground. Wesley Earnest, a former high school assistant principal, was charged last year with the Dec. 2007 slaying of his wife, Jocelyn Branham Earnest, at her Forest, Va. home, reports The News & Advance. Bedford [...]

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A Roanoke lawyer has filed four lawsuits against Lynchburg enema-maker C.B. Fleet Co. alleging the company over-promoted the use of its Fleet Phospho-soda laxative (the stuff you might have been told to drink before a colonoscopy). Each of the four suits filed by Tony Russell demands $10 million in compensatory damages and $350,000 (the statutory [...]

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Davison M. Douglas, the Arthur B. Hanson Professor of Law, has been named the next dean of the William & Mary law school. Douglas succeeds Taylor Reveley, who served as dean of the law school for nearly 10 years before moving to the president’s office in February 2008, according to the William & Mary Web [...]

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A man serving a 74 year sentence for rape could be cleared in the latest non-match DNA case to emerge from old forensic files. Recent testing did not find Thomas E. Haynesworth’s DNA profile in evidence left at the scene of rape in Richmond for which he was convicted, reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch. But testing [...]

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When it comes to an “appearance of impropriety,” judicial codes of ethics may echo Potter Stewart: they know it when they see it. For the first time, a newly revised Code of Conduct for federal judges defines the phrase that governs so much of what judges do, or shouldn’t do. The new version of the [...]

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A woman whose boss accessed her personal e-mail account from points all over the globe cannot collect her damage and attorney’s fee awards totaling more than $410,000, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said yesterday. Bonnie Van Alstyne sued her boss and his company, a small data-conversion firm in Leesburg, for sexual harassment. The [...]

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Restructuring – or getting approval to reject – its contracts with nine labor unions is a key to the Chapter 11 petition filed today by The Greenbrier. That is evident in an affidvait filed in the bankruptcy by Michael McGovern, chief financial officer of Greenbrier Hotel Corp., which also makes it clear that finding a [...]

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