The Court of Appeals of Virginia recently handed down its opinion in Tatusko v. Commonwealth, 79 Va. App. 721 (2024). It’s a reckless-driving case where the defendant was clocked doing 103 in a 60 mph zone. Tatusko doesn’t strike me as especially interesting on the merits; many of the issues raised were discretionary rulings…

Under the pretense of practicing so-called originalism, which claims to interpret the Constitution in line with how it was understood at the nation’s founding, these

I am an introvert and a try-hard. This makes me a lot of fun at parties. (Just kidding I never get invited to parties.) It also means that I encounter most of the words I see in print as opposed to real life. So I’m not always 100% sure about how they are supposed to…

The Court of Appeals of Virginia handed down its opinion in Ho v. Rahman today. Ho is an adverse-possession case and a published opinion, but I’m not so interested in the merits. I’m much more interested in the opinion’s treatment of a preservation question.

As a threshold matter, the court addressed the appellee’s claim that…

• Competition for judges’ time and attention. Judge Friedman reported that the CAV has

Christmas is always a super-stressful time of year for me, but not for any of the normal reasons that plague sane people. My problem is that the people who know and love me tend to get me books–which makes sense, because books and bicycles are basically the twin obsessions of my sad life. The trouble…

An anonymous reader asks if Virginia’s appellate courts are ratcheting down on the use of motions to reconsider to preserve error.

Here’s the background: Traditionally, appellate counsel have used motions to reconsider to clean up the record and preserve new arguments for appeal. It was fairly normal for an appellate lawyer to be hired after…

• Hyemin Han’s play-by-play of the D.C. Circuit argument in the Trump gag order case. Credit to longtime De Novo favorite Judge Millett for this hypo: ““Okay. But he can’t say that that person is an ‘un-truth speaker’?”
• Jeannie Suk Gersen’s take