The VLW Blog

U.S. District Judge Glen M. Williams will retire next week after 34 years on the bench, according to the Associated Press .
Williams was appointed to the district court by President Gerald Ford in 1976. He took senior status in 1988, but has remained active as a judge in the Western District.
By Peter Vieth

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A real estate agency is not vicariously liable for a $36 million judgment entered against its affiliated broker whose car struck a German couple riding a motorcycle in Fauquier County in 2005.
Although broker Charles Ebbets was on his way from a property inspection to the Long & Foster real estate office, he was not acting [...]

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A trail of sexy phone messages and an overnight stay with a woman he met at his tennis club, plus the Viagra a husband kept in his truck, added up to adultery for a Madison County Circuit Court. The Court of Appeals upheld that finding yesterday in Davis v. Davis.
The girlfriend said the messages were [...]

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The man charged in connection with the killings of eight people at a home in Appomattox County last week has hired two Roanoke lawyers.
C.J. Covati and Neil Horn have been retained to defend Christopher Speight, according to The News and Advance .
Horn won acquittal in June of a man accused of felony hit-and-run in the [...]

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A Norfolk state court judge hearing 65 Chinese drywall lawsuits has rejected motions to disqualify the plaintiffs’ lawyer and move some of the cases to other courts.
Norfolk lawyer Richard Serpe can continue to represent both class action plaintiffs and individual plaintiffs in the drywall cases, Circuit Judge Mary Jane Hall ruled last week. “[T]he Court [...]

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Simplifying the concept appears to have worked in the initial wrangling over House Bill 93, the effort by personal injury attorneys to streamline cases in which the primary insurer pays its policy limits and additional underinsurance coverage is available for the plaintiff.
The attorneys long have complained that settlement of such cases gets dragged out needlessly [...]

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Del. John M. O’Bannon III, R-Henrico, kicked up a lot of dust with a bill that would allow a judge to order child support for adult children up to age 23 if they are attending college.  The dust settled quickly, though, when O’Bannon allowed the bill to die in the House Courts of Justice Committee [...]

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The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to halt the planned execution of Paul Warner Powell, who was sentenced to death for the murder and attempted rape of a Prince William County girl in 1999.
Powell’s death was scheduled for July, but that date was canceled when the high court said it needed more time to review [...]

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Today the United States Supreme Court has remanded the appeal in Briscoe v. Virginia, involving a pre-Melendez-Diaz decision in which a divided Supreme Court of Virginia (deciding Briscoe and a companion case, Magruder v. Commonwealth) upheld the Virginia statute that allowed prosecutors to use affidavits, not live testimony, to provide forensic evidence for drug analysis [...]

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Virginia Supreme Court Justice Cynthia D. Kinser dissented today as the court agreed to additions to the Virginia State Bar’s governance aimed at promoting diversity.
The amendments to the court’s rules give the chair of the VSB’s new diversity conference a seat on the Bar Council. The changes also add diversity promotion to the Council’s list [...]

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