The Virginia Appellate Lawyer’s Court of Appeals of Virginia Blog

William R. Winters v. Cleome J. Winters, is, as the case suggests, a domestic relations case, but what it actually involves is the violation of a court order to seal part of the record.  The part of the record at issues was a psychological report ordered by the circuit court to assist in in determining the best interest of the couples three children with respect to custody.  After the father disclosed the contents of the sealed report, the circuit court imposed as a sanction

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 such as “Best Bombastic Barristers of the Boondocks” or “Liberty Loving Lawyers,” etc.  To receive the “award” however, you have to be a member of the “association” that bestows the award. As one observer has put i

To say that Virginia’s Court of Appeals never reverses a criminal conviction would be an exaggeration. In truth, all appellate courts everywhere tend to affirm far more than they reverse judgments, so the odds are already against any given criminal defendant appealing a conviction. By one measure, considering all the appeals that are refused at the petition stage under the current manner for seeking an appeal in a criminal case, the Court of Appeals’ reversal rate in criminal

As this post’s headline intimates, when I began reading the sole published opinion of the Court of Appeal today, I immediately harkened back to an episode of Dragnet.  Now let me be clear that I am not old enough to remember the radio version of the franchise or even to have seen the original run of the first television series.  But I did see the first revival in first run and the original in repeats.  So what was it about the opinion that sent me down nostalgia lane?  I reca

The Court of Appeals released its first published opinion of the new “term” on Tuesday – yes, I know that the appellate court’s in Virginia don’t really have “terms” because they never go into recess, but for so long as memory serves, the appellate bar – and even the courts themselves, have informally recognized a summer hiatus followed by a new appellate “year” starting in September, thus getting a jump of the US Supreme Court by a month. Caine Calif Davis v. Commonwealth of