On Justice Carrico

This article from the Richmond paper on Chief Justice Carrico of the Virginia Supreme Court at age 94 includes some interesting views on his five decades as a justice, chief justice, and senior justice. The article suggests that his most famous opinion as a justice was in the Loving case, affirming Virginia's ban on inter-racial marriage, the case that was then reversed by the United States Supreme Court, but that he makes no apology for applying the law as he found it at that point in time.

On sentencing in the W.D. Va.

The Roanoke Times had this interesting article on the role of the federal probation office in federal sentencing in Western District of Virginia cases. It quotes among others Judge Conrad and Judge Turk - and Paul Dull, distinguished graduate of the Appalachian School of Law and a fine fellow. The occasion for the article was the fuss raised by defense counsel in a case where the confidential part of a pre-sentence report was accidentally made available to him.

Wait, do I still have some of these?

The Virginia Gazette reports here on a William & Mary grad who returned an overdue book he checked out from the Williamsburg library in 1975. He told the library his lawyer had advised him to turn himself in. There was no fine since the library's records did not go back so far.

He said it.

"The judiciary acts as a ballast on our ship of state, and it prevents the ship from being wrecked on the reefs of inappropriate judgment, and should not be steered by the whims of hysterical opinion."

- Judge Burton Roberts, quoted today in his obituary in the New York Times.