On registering the poor to vote in Virginia

This report describes efforts to get the government of the Commonwealth to get more poor people registered in compliance with the National Voter Registration Act.

Another provocative Daniel Gilbert story

This story in the Bristol paper lets the reader decide whether the son of a circuit court judge got some kind of preferential treatment in the handling of his DUI case. The odd part seems to be not the outcome - which is credibly explained by the prosecutor - but rather the conduct of the hearing in a different room away from the usual assembly of the huddled masses in district court - that's evidently what caused some editor to put this story on the front page, a decision which in itself is interesting and questionable.

If you write a lot of briefs and use Westlaw and Firefox like I do

You ought to try CiteGenie - it does what it claims to do.

The partial birth abortion case

Here is a Findlaw article on the rehearing in the case over the Virginia partial birth abortion statute, which was also described here in the Richmond paper.

And, I'm guessing the Fourth Circuit will go along with the district court and the panel decision.

When you must plead who

In U.S. ex rel. Radcliffe v. Purdue, Chief Judge Jones made a number of interesting rulings, including the issue of pleading fraud under Rule 9(b).

Should teachers be allowed to wear their Obama pins at school?

Julie Hilden opines here that they should.

She writes:

"Rather than pretending to a false neutrality, teachers should put their views on the table and let students challenge them. Otherwise, we'll be in the anomalous position of having English and History teachers instruct students about how writers and speakers convey their political views, explicitly and implicitly -- while at the same time forcing the teachers to falsely deny that they themselves ever hold or convey such views."

That would be fine, except that the teachers always get the last word - grades, the starting lineup on the ballfield, etc.

Oates, J.

They got John Oates as a last minute substitute for tonight's World Series game.

I wish that Johnny Oates had been there instead.