The VLW Blog

Privacy advocate B.J. Ostergren, who posted state officials’ Social Security numbers as a dramatic demonstration of security lapses on official websites, won an appellate victory Monday. A 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel affirmed a district court ruling that a Virginia law barring Ostergren’s public postings violated the First Amendment. The 3-judge panel remanded [...]

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A Norfolk Circuit Court has denied a prosecutor’s request for a DUI defendant’s hospital records from the night he was arrested at the hospital where he was taken after a traffic accident. In a case of apparent first impression, Norfolk Circuit Judge Mary Jane Hall in Commonwealth v. Parks quashed the commonwealth’s subpoena duces tecum [...]

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The death of a Virginia teenager highlights inconsistent rules on releasing information about child abuse investigations, according to The Washington Post. Despite a report a neighbor made to the Prince William County’s Department of Social Services that 13-year-old Lexie Agyepong-Glover appeared to have been abused, officials failed to rescue her before she was slain a [...]

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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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The Virginia Judicial Council sent to the Supreme Court of Virginia today a formal set of Rules of Evidence and a proposed Part Nine to the Supreme Court’s rules that would regulate access to private information in court records. The proposed Rules of Evidence are the result of more than 20 years of off and [...]

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