The VLW Blog

U.S. Magistrate Judge B. Waugh Crigler says he will step down at the end of his term in September. He will have served 32 years in the Western District of Virginia, sitting primarily in the Charlottesville and Harrisonburg federal courthouses. A native of Culpeper, Crigler, 64, had a litigation practice in that town before his [...]

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Federal trial courts in Roanoke have been displaced from the Poff Federal Building because of loose bricks on one side of the 14-story building. The building and all agencies within will be closed Monday and Tuesday due to construction, according to a notice on the courts’ website. Closure is possible on Wednesday, Nov. 21, as [...]

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Retired U.S. District Judge Glen M. Williams of Jonesville died Sunday at the age of 92, various sources report. Judge Williams had served on the federal bench for 34 on the district court bench. He was appointed by President Gerald Ford in 1976. He assumed senior status in 1988 and remained active as a judge [...]

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Here’s one way to keep the populace happy: Don’t have them jump into a federal jury pool when they likely will not have to serve. That “juror utilization” metric is something court administrators track, and the Federal Judicial Center has announced that Virginia’s Western District was one of five federal courts that improved its juror [...]

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Tim Heaphy – the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Virginia – is going social. His office now is using both Twitter and Facebook to communicate with the public. “Social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook have become essential communication tools in our interconnected world,” Heaphy said in a news release. The prosecutor’s [...]

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Donald Trump’s effort to get a bargain price on “Albemarle House,” the 23,000-square-foot former home of John and Pat Kluge, has foundered in federal court. A Charlottesville federal judge declared Thursday that the New York developer does not have a right of first refusal to buy the Albemarle County mansion, leaving Bank of America free [...]

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Keeping track of someone else’s federal litigation used to require sending someone to the courthouse every so often to see if anything had been filed. Nowadays, PACER allows monitoring of a case from your desktop. As if that were not easy enough, the clerk’s office at the Western District of Virginia has gone one better. [...]

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A judge has upheld a jury verdict rejecting claims that the design of a child car seat led to devastating brain injury for a five-year-old girl. While Abingdon federal Judge James P. Jones denied the girl’s motion for a new trial, he increased an award of attorneys’ fees to her lawyers based on discovery misconduct [...]

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A Roanoke federal judge has ordered the Pittsylvania County supervisors to halt the routine use of Christian prayers to open their meetings. U.S. District Judge Michael F. Urbanski held Friday that none of the arguments in favor of the county board’s prayer policy “has any merit.” Concluding that a citizen who challenged the prayers was [...]

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Roanoke lawyer Robert S. Ballou has been selected as a U.S. Magistrate Judge for the Western District of Virginia to replace Michael Urbanski, who was recently elevated to the district court bench. Ballou is a partner with the Roanoke firm of Johnson, Ayers & Matthews. He served for eight years on the Virginia State Bar’s [...]

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