The VLW Blog

The Alexandria Gazette Packet reports the increasing use of credit cards instead of cash presents new opportunities for crooks.

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The Suffolk commonwealth’s attorney will not charge a shopowner who shot and killed a late-night burglar in his store, as reported by The Virginian-Pilot.

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You don’t find all that many popular songs about lawyers or the law, but here are some tunes that hit the charts: 1. Lawyers in Love – Jackson Browne. (1983) (Has never been played at a two-lawyer wedding, so far as we know). 2. Take a Letter, Maria – R.B. Greaves. (1969) (Guy dumps his [...]

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ABINGDON–Virginia Chief Justice Leroy Rountree Hassell Sr., speaking at a “town hall” meeting in Southwest Virginia, pronounced an obituary for the state’s controversial judicial performance evaluation program. “It’s dead – that’s about the nicest way I can say it,” Hassell said. “That program will not exist for quite some time, I believe, because of the [...]

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ABINGDON–Virginia lawyers may soon get a glimpse of what is promised to be a simple and centralized system for electronic filing in the state courts. Virginia Chief Justice Leroy Rountree Hassell Sr. drew applause when he told a roomful of lawyers the state’s planned electronic filing system will be lawyer-friendly. “It’s going to be available [...]

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The jury deadlocked in an Albemarle County trial involving a killing 21 years ago. In 1988, Roger Lee Shifflett was robbed and shot to death at the convenience store he owned and operated, reports The Daily Progress. Less than a month after the shooting, defendant Alvin Lee Morris divorced his own wife, married Shifflett’s widow and [...]

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Supporters of the Bedford County National D-Day Memorial are being asked to push to make the site a U.S. monument. The memorial, which opened eight years ago, honors the heavy loss of casualties among Bedford soldiers who landed at Omaha Beach in June 1944, reports The News & Advance. But due to financial troubles, the [...]

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Paul W. Powell will not be executed tomorrow night. U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts granted a stay of execution today pending review of his petition for a writ of certiorari to the high court. The three-sentence order indicates that Powell shouldn’t put but so much faith in the stay, however. If the court denies the [...]

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A software customer has to pay damages for copyright infringement for the continued ghostly presence of the software it had promised to remove from all its computer hard-drives. Quantum Systems Integrators Inc. licensed software to Sprint Nextel Inc. in 1997 for use in data-monitoring functions on several hundred Sprint computers. In 2004, Sprint switched providers [...]

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We couldn’t make this up: a Florida judge had to rule on a request from a plaintiff’s lawyer to make the defense lawyer wear better shoes at a jury trial. According to the plaintiff’s “motion to compel defense counsel to wear appropriate shoes at trial,” defense lawyer Michael Robb was known to wear shoes with [...]

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