Back on August 11, the Supreme Court of Virginia dropped a major bomb on the appellate world with a single sentence in Hill v. Commonwealth. The sentence was “In judicial orders, as in ordinary conversation, meaning can be clearly expressed and just as clearly...
Time for another patented rant. When talking to your clients, you always need to be careful with the words you choose, of course. But this rant is about a particular phrase that I think attorneys use too often when speaking to clients which leads to much confusion...
Time for another patented rant. There have been a number of news stories dealing with Virginia politics and politicians that have raised my hackles lately. [Ed. Note: the phrase "raise my hackles" refers to hairs or a ruff of fur on the back of an animal’s neck that...
In the Virginia Mercury today, Ned Oliver reports that Attorney General Jason Miyares wants 75 new positions to handle an "unexpected" upturn in criminal appeals to the Court of Appeals under the appeal of right law. Under the new law, the AG's office represents the...
Elwin Charles "Preacher" Roe was a baseball player from Ash Flat, Arkansas. His major league career spanned 16 years in the mid-20th century, excepting a few years in the middle when he served is the armed forces during the Second World War and, though he was a five...
Time for another rant. Yesterday, NASA announced that it was having to delay its first test mission for the planned return to the moon. On social media and news comment threads, the comments were mostly negative, with many calling for NASA to be defunded as a "waste...
In hopefully what is not a sign of things to come, the first month of the New Year passed without a single granted appeal from the Supreme Court of Virginia. This is not unusual. Last year the court did not grant an appeal until February 9, and that was the only...
Today is opinion day for the Supreme Court of Virginia, and while I typically will read the opinions from the east side of Ninth Street, I leave the commentary to the sage of Virginia Beach, Steve Emmert. However, as he concluded his analysis of the Court's sole...
Have you noticed that, according to their critics, American politicians are concurrently Nazis (imposing vaccine mandates/separating immigrant families), Socialists (expanding Medicaid/favoring specific industries), Communists (Infrastructure spending/umm . . . no...
So today I received my very first "vanity award" notification. If you are not familiar with the term "vanity award," its basically advertising in the form of a notification that you have been nominated or selected or are under consideration for a prestigious award...