The VLW Blog

Dow Jones and Virginia local newspapers have been squabbling over public notice rights in the past year. When the Wall Street Journal decided to cherry-pick public notices in Virginia, papers like the Richmond Times-Dispatch and The Virginian-Pilot headed to court.
Del. Steve Landes, R-Waynesboro, had an idea to open up the market even more, with a [...]

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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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When working women – from CEOs to secretaries – meet to network, balancing “work v. life” issues is one topic that is sure to break the ice.
Carol Evans, CEO and president of Working Mother Media, invites every woman in the daily struggle to consider herself an “extraordinary woman.” That was Evans’ pitch today at [...]

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A Front Royal lawyer who serves on the town council has caused a stir by striking up a conversation with a circuit judge about a hot local tax case.
The lawyer-councilman, Thomas Sayre , said it was just an innocent inquiry about whether the judge had issued a written ruling. The judge apparently didn’t see [...]

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Studying for the Bar Exam? There’s an app for that…but it’ll cost you.
BarMax, a new iPhone application developed by Harvard law grads, is available through Apple’s Web site for $999.99.
But is it worth the money? According to TechCruch, it just might be.
The mobile bar exam prep course offers its users a gigabyte’s worth of [...]

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The Norfolk Circuit Court clerk’s office is now a voice in the Virginia legal community on Twitter.
The court began tweeting the past Wednesday, making it the first (at least to our knowledge) circuit court in the commonwealth to jump on board the popular social networking platform.
You can follow their tweets at twitter.com/nccco.
By Sarah [...]

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The Supreme Court of Virginia has asked the Virginia State Bar and the Virginia Trial Lawyers Association to withdraw legislation they had planned to introduce on payee notification.
The Virginia State Bar Council had endorsed the concept in October. The latest developments are available for our subscribers on the VLW Web site.

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Looking for a tutorial on police interrogation tactics? We’ve got something better than a Law & Order rerun.
Two Norfolk police detectives brought 17-year-old Kelsey Erin Helvenston into the police station on March 22 to question her about a fatal shooting the previous day. At 10:10 p.m., the detectives turned on a camera to record six [...]

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Two deputies have been injured in a shooting incident involving an inmate at the Fauquier County courthouse, according to published reports.
The Associated Press said the inmate was in custody and the deputies were taken for medical care.  WUSA reports the incident occurred just after 1 p.m., and that one deputy was shot and the other [...]

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“Just showing up” is 80 percent of the formula for success in life, we’re told.
Indeed, “just showing up” may be all it takes to become a successful police informant, if one reads a dissent in a gun case released yesterday by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Here’s how the car-search scenario played out in [...]

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