The VLW Blog

Highway 220, the road leading to and from The Homestead, was covered with campaign signs for Mark Warner and Jim Gilmore in preface to Saturday’s VBA debate. Advantage: Warner.  

The more recent ex-gov clearly won the sign war up and down the highway. A couple of completely anecdotal observations:

Warner was out earlier. There didn’t seem to be any Gilmores on the road on Thursday afternoon as attendees at the VBA summer do rolled in.

Warner had more. Given the press reports about the size of the candidates’ respective war chests, that’s no surprise. Warner’s were bigger too (see the pic).

Warner went further north up 220 and further south down 220, almost to Covington.

Warner had a little “Warnermobile” tooting around town. Okay, it was a pickup truck with big signs. Gilmore had to hate that.

He had to hate this too: Someone had fashioned and posted a lot of “McCain for President, Warner for U.S. Senate” placards along the highway. Those disappeared from the side of the road quickly after the debate, for some reason.

By Paul Fletcher

A Roanoke federal judge has refused to set aside a jury verdict that found a trucking company negligent for hiring an inexperienced driver for a hurry-up delivery of a “hot load.”

That verdict, handed down in early May, may be founded on new law in the big-dollar, big-rig field of tractor-trailer litigation.

On July 7, U.S. District Judge Glen Conrad denied defendant C.H. Robinson Worldwide’s motion for a new trial. Prior to trial, Conrad ruled that the motor carrier broker could be sued for “negligent hiring of an independent contractor.” The judge said in his June 10 decision that no Virginia case had applied the negligent hiring theory in the context of a broker’s selection of a carrier, but he predicted the Supreme Court of Virginia would extend the claim to the negligent hiring of an independent contractor in this tractor-trailer accident.

In his July 7 denial of post-trial motions in Jones v. C.H. Robinson Worldwide Inc., Conrad said that information available to the public should have tipped the defendant that the trucking company “had a propensity to hire incompetent, unsafe drivers,” and there was enough circumstantial evidence to show the driver’s erratic driving caused the wreck.

A bench trial on damages is set for July 21.

By Deborah Elkins

Former secretaries of state James A. Baker III and Warren Christopher are the big names associated with the National War Powers Commission, but the group that issued its report today on the interaction between the president and Congress on matters of war has a strong Virginia connection.

The Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia impaneled the commission in February 2007, and W. Taylor Reveley III, interim president at the college of William and Mary, and John C. Jeffries Jr., professor and former dean at the U.Va. law school, were its co-directors..

The respective authority of Congress and the president on the use of force overseas has been a topic of interest for 40 years for Reveley. W&M’s office of university relations has an account of that interest, along with links to the commission’s report and other information about its work. The New York Times has an op-ed column by Baker and Christopher as well.
By Alan Cooper

The 4th of July weekend is coming, and many people will be traveling, but thanks to the price of gas, maybe not as many as in years past. This sign explains why:

The rule that the plan documents, not the summary plan description, control usually works to the detriment of long-term disability claimants in disputes with ERISA administrators.

Not this time. The SPD clearly gave Prudential Insurance Company of America the sole discretion to determine eligibility for benefits. But the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday that no such language existed in the plan documents themselves. Worse for Prudential, the SPD language “demonstrates that Prudential knows how to draft language expressly reserving discretionary authority.”

The result in Woods v. Prudential is that the trial judge erred in reviewing the administrator’s denial of benefits under an abuse of discretion standard. The appellate court remanded the case for review de novo, a more favorable standard for the claimant.
By Alan Cooper

The 25-year-old woman went to Fairfax General District Court expecting Judge Lisa A. Mayne to preside over her trial on a drunken driving charge.

The prosecutor told her attorney, Corinne Magee, he needed some time to talk to the police officer. Magee told her client, who was there with her fiancé, that she could wander around the court building for a while.

While they were gone, the prosecutor told Magee that the arresting officer had been fired from the police department and that he would have to drop the charge.

When the couple returned, they were delighted to learn that the charge had been dropped, and they told Magee that they had made good use of the time. They had gotten a marriage license.

They explained that they were going to have formal, family wedding out of the country in a few months but wanted to go ahead and have a civil ceremony beforehand. They asked Magee if she thought they could get married while they were there.

Magee asked Judge Mayne if she would perform the ceremony when her docket ended.

The judge agreed, and the woman who had entered the courthouse as a drunken driving defendant left it as a bride.

By Alan Cooper

Richmond personal injury attorney Jay Tronfeld has settled his lawsuit alleging that a Nationwide adjuster defamed him by telling a client that Tronfeld “just takes people’s money.”

The case had been scheduled for trial yesterday in Petersburg Circuit Court, but David P. Baugh, Tronfeld’s attorney, said it was settled under confidential terms.

The adjuster also told the client that Tronfeld’s clients would get more money if they dealt with the adjuster directly rather than hiring Tronfeld. The trial judge ruled that those comments could not be defamatory because they were statements of opinion rather than fact.

The Supreme Court of Virginia disagreed in Tronfeld v. Nationwide. The test for differentiating a statement of fact from opinion is whether the comment can be proved true or false.

Tronfeld should have been allowed to attempt to prove that that he did not take money without providing services and that he obtained more money from clients than the adjuster offered, the court said.

By Alan Cooper

MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell stepped in a pile last week, insulting the people of Bristol. Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama was in Southwest Virginia, appearing with former Gov. Mark Warner, who is running for the Senate seat being vacated by Republican John Warner.

Mitchell noted that Obama and Warner were together, calling the image of them in Bristol “interesting.”

She continued: “This is real [laugh] redneck, sort of…um, bordering on Appalachia country.” Mitchell added, “This is not the Northern Virginia, uh, sort of high-tech corridor. These are not voters [Obama] would logically be gravitating to.”

You can catch the whole thing on YouTube.

As campaign “analysis,” Mitchell’s comment calls for an almost obligatory “No [kidding], Sherlock” rejoinder that of course a candidate should go after votes he might not otherwise get.

But the people of the Mountain Empire don’t like to overlooked. Or insulted. Mitchell’s ignorant regional comment was met forcefully. Take a look at the column by Todd Foster, the editor of the Bristol Herald Courier.

Mitchell apologized on-air Monday. But she seemed to dismiss the epithet “redneck” as one used by “consultants” to characterize certain voters.

“I owe an apology to the good people of Bristol, Virginia, for something stupid that I said last week,” she noted.

Stupid doesn’t begin to describe it.

By Paul Fletcher

Updating an April 30 blog entry, the Virginia Court of Appeals today granted rehearing en banc in Scialdone v. Commonwealth.

In its April 29 split panel decision, the appellate court reversed summary contempt, including jail terms, for two Virginia Beach lawyers and their law clerk. The lawyers, Claude Scialdone and Barry Taylor, were defending their client Frankie Dulyea on criminal charges stemming from online conversations in 2005 with an undercover cop pretending to be a pubescent girl. Virginia Beach Circuit Judge Patricia West ordered the lawyers to jail for offering into evidence an altered document purporting to show Internet chat-room rules at the time of Dulyea’s chats.

By Deborah Elkins

Hunton & Williams partner Robert J. Grey Jr. has joined the crowded race to succeed L. Douglas Wilder as Richmond mayor.

Grey, 57, is a former president of the American Bar Association and a longtime confidant of Wilder. He has never held or sought public office.

The Times-Dispatch has a list of the candidates.