The VLW Blog

A former Virginia resident has joined other disillusioned devotees of a nationwide chain of Yoga facilities who claim the organization robbed them of their free will and took control of their minds and their money. Andrew Myers is suing various entities affiliated with the Dahn Yoga chain in a 77-page lawsuit in Alexandria federal court, [...]

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The Virginia State Bar Criminal Law Section has presented its 2010 Harry L. Carrico Professionalism Award to retired Virginia Court of Appeals Judge Jere M.H. “Mac” Willis Jr. of Fredericksburg. In presenting this year’s award at the group’s meeting in Williamsburg last week, section chair Richard E. Trodden, commonwealth’s attorney for Arlington County, said Willis [...]

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Sarah Palin. The Salahis. The “Haddocks Squared.” Dapper Congressman Jim Moran as a song-and-dance man. They all showed up last night at the George Washington Masonic Memorial (right) in Alexandria. Masonic temples may be suspected sites for secret rites, but the Alexandria temple gave up secrets last night when the Alexandria Bar Association put on [...]

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The Supreme Court of Virginia issued two unpublished orders today, one reaffirming the rule that you can’t get more than you sue for and the second holding that the fourth-offense drunken driving statute permits both a prison term and a fine. In the ad damnum case, the plaintiff sought “approximately” $50,000 in damages, and the [...]

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In what will be a novelty for the Western District of Virginia, judges plan to publish a set of local rules in the next few weeks to govern practice in the federal courts. “We’re very close,” said Chief U.S. District Judge James Jones of Abingdon. A proposed set of rules was posted in November with [...]

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A Williamsburg-James City County Circuit Court has rejected a nursing home’s motion to compel arbitration of a man’s complaint that his 84-year-old mother died after developing extensive bedsores while in the nursing home’s care. The decision is the latest to test the limits of arbitration clauses in nursing home contracts. When Bob Wiggins Jr. sued [...]

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The late comedian Richard Pryor once performed at a prison. He later confessed he expected to feel a kinship with the oppressed inmates. After he actually met some of them, however, he exclaimed, “Thank God we got jails!” That expression comes to mind while reading about Christopher Allen Coates in this opinion from Chief U.S. [...]

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The 4th Circuit has set aside a $10 million punitive damage award in a race discrimination case that was the largest verdict reported in 2008 in Virginia Lawyers Weekly. In its Feb. 12 decision in Worldwide Network Services LLC v. DynCorp Internat’l LLC, the appellate panel upheld the jury award of $5 million in compensatory [...]

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Same song, only a slightly different verse. Eddie Nelson Ray wanted to call his mother to testify in his trial on charges of obtaining money by false pretenses and uttering a false bank note. The judge said no, and there was no proffer as to what Momma might have said. Not surprisingly, the Virginia Court [...]

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An inherited six-figure bank account first led to international intrigue and then to possible prison time for a pediatric ear-nose-and-throat doctor in Northern Virginia. According to a Justice Department news release , Leesburg otolaryngologist Andrew Silva has acknowledged more than a decade of deception in hiding money from a Swiss bank account he inherited from [...]

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