Category: Courts and law
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What Kind of Society Do Virginians Want? The Case of Fairfax County
by James C. Sherlock Yesterday I offered for consideration a lengthy list of misdemeanors that Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano in Fairfax County is declining to prosecute. I did that with a hope that the House of Delegates will amend and pass HB 1198. Today I am going to ask Virginians to consider in what type of society…
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Imprisoned by the Past
by James A. Bacon As a parting gift to Virginia, outgoing Attorney General Mark Herring has overturned 58 opinions issued by attorneys general between 1904 and 1967 that supported racially discriminatory laws from poll taxes to the prohibition of interracial marriage. “While these discriminatory and racist laws are no longer on the books in Virginia,…
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Herring’s ERA Advisory Opinion Is Flawed, Self-Defeating
by Emilio Jaksetic On January 6, 2022, Attorney General Mark Herring issued an advisory legal opinion in which he concluded that the Virginia General Assembly cannot rescind its January 2020 decision to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). What is amazing about Herring’s advisory opinion is its reliance on one passage of the Supreme Court…
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Delegating Emission Standards to California Is Unconstitutional
by Emilio Jaksetic As Steve Haner noted in a December 10 post, “Now California Will Control Virginia’s Auto Sales,” the Virginia Air Pollution Control Board (VAPCB) adopted a regulation that places ultimate control of Virginia’s vehicle emission standards in the hands of the California Air Resources Board. Although the VAPCB acted pursuant to a statute…
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Why Is UVa Hiding Its Campus Climate Survey Results?
by Walter Smith Jim Bacon recently posted an article urging Governor-elect Youngkin to take full advantage of his higher-ed Board of Visitors appointments if he wishes to remain true to the education reform momentum that played a big part in his election. Bacon’s bits (pun intentional!) on the Boards as political plums with a go-along-to-get-along…
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Redistricting: Partisan Fighting Continues
by Dick Hall-Sizemore The diabolical person who came up with the framework for the state constitutional amendment establishing a redistricting commission was not content with designing it so that it would fail due to partisan wrangling. He also injected partisan politics into the phase in which the state Supreme Court must come up with the…
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What Is Going on in Portsmouth?
by Kerry Dougherty Are there cities that are more dysfunctional than Portsmouth, Virginia? Yes, of course there are. There’s always San Francisco where you can get an app for your phone called “SnapCrap” to allow you to report piles of human feces to city sanitation workers. There’s Chicago. The Windy City was recently designated the…
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Herring Intervenes to Protect Hospital Competition… in Pennsylvania
by James A. Bacon It’s encouraging to see that Mark Herring has taken a forceful action against an “anticompetitive hospital merger” in his final days as Attorney General. Too bad the targets of his judicial intervention are in New Jersey, not Virginia. Herring has joined a bipartisan coalition of 26 attorneys general filing an amicus…
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The Loudoun Way — School Rapes by a Member of a Progressive Protected Class
by James C. Sherlock Any time you think there is only one system of justice in America, consider these two stories I offer below, one a progressive dream and the other true. The true story will show some progressives care more about their dogma than kids. And any time you think only big city progressives…
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Who Will Guard the Guards?
by Michael Fruitman and Jim McCarthy Emily P. Newman is a member of the Virginia State Bar (VSB), admitted, i.e., licensed to practice, in 2012. Publicly available information reveals that Ms. Newman was a staffer in Congress and in the administration of Donald Trump up to the time of the election of Joe Biden. It…
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Convicted, But Innocent–Emerson Stevens
by Dick Hall-Sizemore In August, Governor Northam granted a full pardon to Emerson Stevens. Stevens had been convicted of killing a young mother of two in 1985 in a small fishing village on the Northern Neck. The pardon was based on evidence that “reflects Mr. Stevens’ innocence.” Stevens maintained from the beginning that he was…
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Former Norfolk Sheriff Convicted of Fraud and Bribery
by Dick Hall-Sizemore Here is another name to add to the list of corrupt public officials — former Norfolk Sheriff Bob McCabe. Earlier this week, a federal jury convicted him of all 11 counts of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering. The charges covered actions committed over a 22-year period. They included accepting gift cards to…
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Supreme Court Refuses to Block Vaccination Mandate; Judicial Review Generally
by Dick Hall-Sizemore The U.S. Supreme Court has flatly turned down a request for an injunction against the enforcement by Indiana University that all students and staff be vaccinated against COVID-19. This request was an appeal of a unanimous decision of the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit denying the request. The order was…
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Return to Autocracy in Virginia
by James C. Sherlock. Updated Aug 13, 12:15 PM It was so easy to predict that I can claim no special prescience. I wrote a week ago: “The Governor’s 15-month emergency powers expired June 30, and, God, does he miss them…. (H)ow long (will the) governor put up with the lack of emergency powers?” If…
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Oyez, Oyez. The Virginia Court of Appeals is Changing.
by Dick Hall-Sizemore One of the General Assembly’s most cherished prerogatives is the election of judges. When one party controls both houses of the legislature, that power is particularly relished. The Democrats had the opportunity in this special session to exercise its prerogative in a big way by electing eight judges to the Virginia Court…