De Novo: A Virginia Appellate Law Blog : Virginia Appellate Lawyer & Attorney : James O'Keeffe : Gentry Locke Rakes & Moore Law Firm : VA Court of Appeals Commentary & Analysis

Here are more of the questions and searches that have led people to De Novo, and our feeble attempts to address them:

Cufflinks at oral argument?

No.

Noting objections on a final judgment order in Virginia.

Generally a good idea, espcially if the trial court is still in a position to take corrective action. The more specific your objections, the better.

A few cases that you may want to check out include:

• Helms v. Manspile, 277 Va. 1, 6-7, 671 S.E.2d 127, 129-30 (2009) (where defendants argued in written closing that they owned a parcel of land by adverse possession, endorsing final order as "seen" did not waive their argument and preserved their adverse possession claim for appeal);
• Scialdone v. Commonwealth, 279 Va. 422, 440, 689 S.E.2d 716, 726 (2010) ("[W]here a party makes his objections known to the court prior to or at the time of entry of a final order or decree and does not specifically disclaim the desire to have the court rule on those objections, entry of a final order or decree adverse to those objections constitutes a rejection of them and preserves them under [the contemporaneous objection rule] for purposes of appeal.");
• Levisa Coal Co. v. Consolidation Coal Co., 276 Va. 44, 56 n.4 (2008) (later filing written objections to trial court's ruling from the bench satisfied Rule 5:25);
• Lee v. Lee, 12 Va. App. 512, 404 S.E.2d 736 (1991) (objecting generally to an order will not suffice to preserve for review errors not raised in the record).

Is Cynthia Kinser a Federal Judge in Virginia?

No, she is the Chief Justice-elect of the Virginia Supreme Court. Thanks for your loyal readership.

Virginia appellate brief example?

The merits briefs from the Episcopal church property dispute are online here. That should get you started. Also, we're generally glad to share examples of our work from decided cases. Just send me an email or give me a call.

Law of hitting a cow in a vehicle in VA? 

What is your cow doing in a car? If you are talking about hitting a cow with a vehicle, the law is surprisingly well developed. I recommend Browning v. East. 

She lawyer "martial arts".

Joss Whedon is working on the pilot even as we speak. It can't be worse than Dollhouse.

Remember: None of this is legal advice. We are not your lawyers. If you are coming here for legal advice, then you've got bigger problems than we can solve in a blog post.

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It's time for another round of the increasingly bizarre searches that lead people to this blog, and our responses:

• can appellee attend argument on petition in virginia? Yes, appellees can and often do attend writ arguments. They just don't get to argue themselves. See Va. Sup. Ct. R. 5:17(j)(i).
• Supreme Court of Virginia did not have the guts. That's crazy talk. Next.
• How do you blue book the Virginia Rules of Professional Conduct? (Yes, the person asking about the Blue Book capitalizes and punctuates his search terms.) I follow the form in Rule 12.8.6 for the ABA Model Rules. I can't replicate the citation form here, because I can't do small caps, but it would look something like this: VA. RULES OF PROF'L CONDUCT R. 1.3 (2004).
• Virginia legal blogs. VLW maintains this list. It's a good start.
• zombie appellant. Okay, I admit that I had to look this one up. It has something to do with the strange place where Halloween meets social protest and interpretive dance.
• NY black angus. I never cease to be amazed by the number of bovine inquiries we get. Thanks for sending all those readers our way, Google. I'm switching to Bing.
• justice kinser's phone number. The zombie appellant didn't bother me, but for some reason this seems creepy. I like Justice Kinser, too--especially after Scialdone--but maybe stick to the publicly available contact information on the Supreme Court's website.

Remember: I am not your lawyer. None of this is legal advice. It in no way reflects the opinions of the Firm on the Move (TM), or, for that matter, of any right-thinking person.

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Another round of our answers to the imponderable questions that lead people to this blog:

• chances of supreme court of virginia providing a petition rehearing: Not good. For example, in 2007, the Court decided 358 petitions for rehearing. It granted 13. In 2008, it decided 367 petitions for rehearing and granted 23. I suspect that this is because the petition for rehearing is a fundamentally poor advocacy vehicle; it is short and (because of its procedural posture) inherently lacking in credibility.
• roger creager to hire: Creager to hire, you wish? Contact him you must! Yes, yes. That is the way of things. The way of the Force.
• how often does virginia supreme court accept medical malpractice appeal? Although I don't have statistics to back this up, it's my impression that the SCV accepts med mal appeals disproportionately often. Same goes for appeals in local government cases.
• attorneys who write pet trusts in va: Thankfully, I have not yet sunk to that level of desperation. Call me when Whiskers is ready to sue her trustee. (Just kidding. I hate cats.)
• supreme court of virginia appellate practice: This is a dangerous one, because I am sure to leave someone out by accident. That's how feelings get hurt. Off the top of my head, the lawyers I can think of with established SCV appellate practices (loosely defined as "the people I bump into a lot")--beyond your appellate friends here at the Firm on the Move (TM)--are Steve Emmert, George Somerville and the assorted luminaries at Troutman Sanders, John Davidson, the aforementioned Roger Creager, Frank Friedman, John Eure, Official Friend of De Novo Melissa Scoggins, Joe Rainsbury at LeClair, and the Biglaw legions at Hunton and McGuire Woods.

Disclaimer: As always, this is not legal advice. We are not your lawyers. Depending on where you are when you read this, we may not even be lawyers. If you are coming here for legal advice, you have bigger problems than we can solve.

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It's time for another trip to the virtual mailbag. Here are some recent searches that led to this site, and my best shot at answering the questions they raise:

• elena kagan appellate opinions. You won't find any. I love Solicitor General Kagan as a SCOTUS pick for a lot of reasons, and that is one of them. Unlike, oh, say, Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Stevens, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, Ginsburg, Breyer, Alito, and Sotomayor, General Kagan hasn't sat on a federal circuit court. That's about as much as we can hope for in the way of experiential diversity these days. Orin Kerr makes a hilarious counterargument at the Volokh Conspiracy, pointing up her sterling academic credentials, SCOTUS clerkship, and executive branch experience. Fair enough. Wanna know how a nominee without those qualifications would do? Ask Harriet Miers.
• what's an appellant? That's what they call a "plaintiff" in the Fourth Circuit.
• appellate oral argument outline. I can't really provide a sample, but I can tell you what I do. I am quite happy with this process, which I stole from Greg Haley and Mark Hermann. First, I treat an oral argument as a conversation with the Court, and one in which the best thing I can do is to answer the Court's questions. I will therefore need to be flexible, and will have relatively little control over the structure of the coversation. As a result, I make several outlines. One is a list of the hardest questions I can think of. I start this list at the beginning of the appeal, and update it constantly. I also make a list of the 5-10 key cases, and brief the really important ones so that I am fully conversant with them. Next, I make a detailed outline of the facts of the case, with dates and citations to the Joint Appendix. Finally, I draft an outline of the argument. The outline itself is short, but I put it in enormous 14-point Century Schoolbook for ease of reading. The Court can probably read along with me from the bench.
• twiqbal. I offer my limited and not-terribly-insightful thoughts on the new federal pleading standards; I'm no civ pro expert. That is not to say that I haven't contributed to the debate. It's entirely possible that I coined the term "Twiqbal." Specifically, the first time I used it, I wasn't borrowing it from anyone, but I have no idea if I was actually the first person to use the term. Why do I mention this? Because someone credited me with coining the term at a CLE, which generated the most hilarious piece of hate mail I've every received (names redacted):

In case you can't read it, here's what the email says: "I would have called the doctrine announced in those cases the 'Craunching Marmoset Rule.' I am so stupid. Could you help me come up with words for the following? 1. the post a lamp sits on (I suggest 'illumo-stickster') 2. the port in which you park an automobile ('car-hole'?) 3. the pants that are blue and made out of material that jeans are made of (which I now call 'blue ass-hat leg tubes'). Just joking. We all know Tommy Strelka came up with 'Twiqbal.'"

Well played, Tommy Strelka's mom.

If you've got any questions you'd like to see answered--or if you just want to call me names--please shoot me an email or post a comment. And don't forget that tomorrow is opinion day from the SCV. Update: The Court released its opinions today, a day early. Check out Steve Emmert's website for his opinion summaries.

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