The VLW Blog

It’s a tale of two traffic stops. On June 26, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out a traffic stop based on an officer’s eyeballs-only estimate of a driver’s speed in the case of U.S. v. Sowards. But last Friday, the appellate court upheld a search – same North Carolina district court, same [...]

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An employer did not defame a nurse supervisor when it noted in her employment records that she had been terminated for misconduct related to her reports that she had been cursed at by someone she supervised on a healthcare call-in line. The nurse supervisor, Shirley Shaheen, appealed dismissal of her defamation claim to the 4th [...]

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A man convicted of murder-for-hire will get another chance to show his innocence, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said last week. An appellate panel ordered the Roanoke U.S. District Court to take another look at the gateway test for gaining an evidentiary hearing under the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1995 decision in Schlup v. [...]

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Displaced high school students who were barred from playing interscholastic sports at their new school get no relief from a federal appeals court. A panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the Virginia High School League which denied a waiver for the new students at Castlewood High School. The VHSL refused [...]

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A lawyer accused of unfair debt collection is protected by the “bona fide error defense,” even though he persisted in seeking attorney fees under an invalid contract, a federal appeals court panel has ruled. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a court victory for an Alexandria lawyer who sought to collect for nursing [...]

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It’s not just “heads on the beds” that count when a bankruptcy court is trying to determine “household” size for a Chapter 13 debtor who shares joint custody of two children with her ex-husband. A better count comes from an “economic unit” analysis, according to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The court’s July [...]

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A client’s right to be advised that he could face deportation after a guilty plea is not a “watershed rule” that applies retroactively, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals says. In an opinion released today, the appellate court upheld denial of post-conviction relief for a defendant who was subject to deportation after he pleaded [...]

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A divided 4th Circuit panel has upheld a $1.7 million malicious prosecution award to a night dock supervisor accused of stealing computers from a loading dock of a Colonial Heights shipping company. The award from a jury in Richmond federal court to Clyde L. Bennett was one of VLW’s top verdicts for 2009. Senior U.S. [...]

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Can you count on people to do the right thing when no one’s looking? Not necessarily, according to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Earlier this week, a 4th Circuit panel vacated an Army Corps of Engineers   permit that would have let a developer build a mooring facility and concrete boat ramp near Virginia [...]

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A bankruptcy court can be its own authority on the prevailing pay rate for a winning lawyer, according to a new opinion from the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In awarding $279,090 in fees after upholding the lien priority of Tysons Financial LLC in an adversary proceeding, the bankruptcy court said it could “almost [...]

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