Law Commons^™

Property, W. Wade Berryhill

Law Faculty Publications

The 1986 General Assembly may be remembered as much for what it did not do as for what it did. Carried over into the next session was House Bill 810, which would have abolished dower and curtesy in favor of a statutory share for the surviving spouse in the deceased spouse's estate. Of course, passage of this bill would have ushered in significant change in the practice of decedents' estates. Significantly, passage of the bill also would have legislatively overruled recent judicial and legislative activity which has created the sole and separate estate, for both female and male, allowing circumvention …

Dodging A Bullet, But Opening Old Wounds In Fourth Amendment Jurisprudence, Ronald J. Bacigal

Law Faculty Publications

The Court began its opinion in Winston by "putting to one side the procedural protections of the warrant requirement. " The parties agreed that the defendant had received "a full measure of procedural protections"and that the state had met the "ordinary" standard of probable cause for a search. "Notwithstanding the existence of probable cause" and the state's full compliance with the procedures required by the warrant clause, the Court found that the reasonableness clause of the fourth amendment demands "a more substantial justification" than probable cause. The Court viewed this higher level of justification as a substantive requirement of the …

U.C.C. Survey: General Provisions, Bulk Transfers, And Documents Of Title, David Frisch

Law Faculty Publications

A drafting compromise by the U.C.C. drafters in section 1-105 dictated the state having an "appropriate relation" to govern choice of law problems in the absence of a contractual clause, and if there is a clause, a "reasonable relation" to the state selected. The purpose was to leave choice of law problems to the general rules of the common law. Thus, some courts in breach of warranty cases continue to apply the tests of "place of injury" for personal injury suits and "place of contracting" for what does not involve personal injury, while others look for the state having the …

First Amendment Restrictions On Title I Programs In Private Schools, Laura Gaston Dooley

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Developments In Civil Liberties: 1984-85 Term, Ivan E. Bodensteiner, Rosalie Levinson

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Why You Need A Will - A Pamphlet That Explains The Need To A Layperson, J. Rodney Johnson

Law Faculty Publications

The education of clients and potential clients is an essential cornerstone to the practice of preventive law. A valuable tool that can be used in such education is printed material that explains, in approach and language that can be understood easily by laypersons, the how's and why's of the legal system.

The following material by Professor Johnson is an excellent example of the type of material a firm could prepare for distribution to its clients or potential clients. Obviously, this material is presented merely as an example, and each such pamphlet, of course, would have to be tailored to the …

Review Of State Legislative Sourcebook, Paul M. Birch

Law Faculty Publications

Review of Hellebust, Lynn. State Legislative Sourcebook--1986: A Resource Guide to Legislative Information in the Fifty States.

Implied Hearsay, Ronald J. Bacigal

Law Faculty Publications

Lawyers sometimes exaggerate the significance of a single sentence or footnote in a court opinion. At other times a single phrase may turn out to be a time bomb which subsequently explodes with far reaching result:i. Court watchers thus spend considerable time trying to discern what is implied within the literal language of a court's opinion. It is no small irony that one of the latest implications in a Virginia Supreme Court decision relates to the implications contained within an out-of-court statement that cannot be literally defined as hearsay. A modification of the hearsay rule, or at least the hearsay …

An Alternative Approach To The Good Faith Controversy, Ronald J. Bacigal

Law Faculty Publications

This Article examines the role of police motivation in all facets of fourth amendment jurisprudence and demonstrates that the Court has often considered good faith as one relevant but ill-defined factor in determining substantive aspects of the fourth amendment. The Article concludes that this ambiguous and flexible approach to substantive fourth amendment rights should be utilized when applying the remedy of exclusion.

Moderating Antitrust Subject Matter Jurisdiction: The Foreign Trade Antitrust Improvements Act And The Restatement Of Foreign Relations Law (Revised), Daniel T. Murphy

Law Faculty Publications

Within the last several years two approaches have been taken to tempering the extraterritorial application of the United States antitrust laws. In October 1982 the Foreign Trade Antitrust Improvements Act of 1982 (the "FTAIA") was signed into law. In addition, for the past four years the American Law Institute has been engaged in an effort to revise thoroughly the Restatement of Foreign Relations Law of the United States. It is expected that this effort will culminate in May 1986 with the promulgation of the Restatement of Foreign Relations Law of the United States (Revised) (the "Restatement (Revised)"). These two efforts …

Annual Survey Of Virginia Law - Civil Procedure And Practice, William Hamilton Bryson

Law Faculty Publications

This article considers recent developments in the field of Virginia civil procedure and practice, including statutes, rules of court, and opinions of the Supreme Court of Virginia and the Court of Appeals of Virginia that have appeared between May 1985 and May 1986. This article also comments on cases in volumes three and four of Virginia Circuit Court Opinions, many of which were decided before 1985, but it is appropriate to mention them here since they were only recently made generally available through publication. There have been no major changes in the area of Virginia civil procedure during the period …

Interspousal Tort Immunity In Montana, Carl W. Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

Interspousal tort immunity has a lengthy, rich, and interesting history. But since 1970, courts and legislatures have been increasingly willing to abolish immunity, transforming it into a minority rule which appears destined for widespread elimination by the year 2000. Montana's recent experience is typical. In 1979, the Legislature abolished the rule for intentional torts. However, the Montana Supreme Court has retained the doctrine in the negligence context. The court has recently agreed to reconsider negligence immunity and, should it refuse to change the rule, the Legislature may well address the issue. Thus, it is now appropriate to analyze whether Montana …

Great Expectations And Mismatched Compensation: Government Sponsored Public Participation In Proceedings Of The Consumer Product Safety Commission, Carl W. Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

During the last twenty years, numerous proposals for enhancing the quality of federal administrative agency decisionmaking have been offered, but few actually were implemented. One controversial approach, with which fourteen agencies experimented, has been the reimbursement of non-regulated individuals and organizations for the costs of their involvement in administrative proceedings. A principal purpose of that public funding was to improve agency decisionmaking by rectifying the participatory imbalance between regulated parties and non-commercial interests involved in administrative initiatives; however, little of the government- supported citizen activity that occurred has been analyzed. Participant compensation effectively has been discontinued and most agency proceedings …

Wills, Trusts And Estates (Annual Survey Of Virginia Law, 1985-86), J. Rodney Johnson

Law Faculty Publications

The 1986 session of the General Assembly passed eight bills dealing with wills, trusts, and estates. In addition to this legislation, there were four cases from the Virginia Supreme Court and one case from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals during the past year that involved issues of interest to both the general practitioner and the specialist in wills, trusts, and estates. This article reviews all of these legislative and judicial developments. In order to facilitate the discussion of numerous Virginia Code sections they will be referred to in the text by their section numbers only. These section numbers will …

Realtor Liability For Innocent Misrepresentation And Undiscovered Defects: Balancing The Equities Between Broker And Buyer, Linda S. Whitton

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Administrative Procedure (Annual Survey Of Virginia Law, 1986), John Paul Jones

Law Faculty Publications

Since the last report, administrative law in Virginia has continued to develop on both the legislative and judicial fronts. This year's General Assembly enacted amendments to the state's administrative procedure statute which embody the third and final round of recommendations by the Governor's Regulatory Reform Advisory Board. The major changes were the standardization of procedures for obtaining judicial review of state agency action and the embodiment in statute of a corps of independent hearing officers.

Review Of Virginia Lawyers Practice Handbook: Appellate Practice: Virginia And Federal Courts, William Hamilton Bryson

Law Faculty Publications

A book review on Virginia Lawyers Practice Handbook: Appellate Practice: Virginia and Federal Courts by the Committee on Continuing Legal Education of the Virginia Law Foundation.

Consequences Of Converting A Bankruptcy Case, David G. Epstein

Law Faculty Publications

This paper discusses some of the consequences of converting a bankruptcy case from one chapter to another. At present, there are four different forms of bankruptcy: chapter 7, chapter 9, chapter 11, chapter 13. Congress is currently considering creating yet a fifth form of bankruptcy for farmers. Most individual debtors are now eligible for relief under three of the chapters, 7, 11, or 13. Corporate and partnership debtors can now choose between chapter 7 and chapter 11. The various chapters of the Bankruptcy Code differ in both policy and particulars. A chapter 7 case involves liquidation of the "property of …

Is Revision Due For Article 2?, David Frisch

Law Faculty Publications

Although we ask whether Article 2 should be re-examined, it is not our only question. A second question posed is: What are the sources to which one should look in order to discover whether there is a strong enough need to justify a revision? In addition to mentioning sources, we offer a few examples illustrative of the fruits which these sources can produce. By doing so, we hope to spur additional interest because, if discussion of a new Article 2 is to begin, the sooner it begins the better. Revisions take time. Six years can pass from the time a …