Local governments in Virginia get involved in litigation in federal courts from time to time. Some do quite frequently. I am sharing an article by my Sands Anderson associate, Broderick Dunn, to give you an overview of the recent federal rules changes regarding computation of time in filings, responses and discovery.  This article is an edited [...]

Well, it’s over. The “reasonable person” is dead. Or is it? The U.S. Supreme Court denied the request for a writ of certiorari by the City of Virginia Beach to review the Virginia Supreme Court’s decision overturning the City’s noise ordinance in Tanner v. City of Virginia Beach, 277 Va. 432, 674 S.E.2d 848 (2009).  The Daily Press article on [...]

This informative piece was authored by Oliver Branch, an immigration attorney who works from our Research Triangle Park office in North Carolina. He also blogs at NC Law Life. ____________________________ There are three areas of immigration law where local governments are likely to need help or run into trouble:  (1) sponsoring nonimmigrant visas, (2) sponsoring immigrant [...]

Transfers of Development Rights (TDRs) have long been seen by Virginia localities as a tool for good planning and to achieve the local future land use plan.  But for a long time, Virginia localities had no authority to permit TDRs.  See Opinion to the Honorable Robert T. Andrews, 1985-86 Va. A.G. op. 112 (Loudoun County [...]

It occurred to me that the Virginia Local Government Law blog ought to say something about the legal issues that face local governments at the holidays. And there are many. This time of year, there are the seasonal First Amendment establishment clause issues in “holiday display” cases, such as oh-too-publicly experienced this year in at [...]

The General Assembly, Virginia Supreme Court and the Virginia State Bar have combined to make the job of our local Boards of Zoning Appeals (BZAs), and that of the local government attorney who deals with them, much more complicated. As a long-time county attorney and currently counsel to the Stafford County BZA, I have seen this [...]

This week, the FCC approved, on a 5-0 vote, an order setting presumptive deadlines for localities to resolve applications for siting of telecommunications facilities.  Here is the FCC’s ruling. Under the ruling, localities will have 90 days to consider applications for co-located facilities and 150 days for new tower locations.  This ruling interprets the Communications Act [...]

Back in October, I had an interesting experience by being interviewed as part of the “22 Tweets” project.  Its creator, Lance Godard, describes the project in this way:  “Real-time Twitter interviews with practicing lawyers who tweet.”   The interview went out live, tweet by tweet, in a series of 22 tweets, over Twitter, the 140-character internet blogging service.  People could follow it on [...]

On November 9, 2009, Virginia Attorney General Bill Mims issued an official opinion stating that the State Board of Health’s adoption of emergency regulations would trigger preemption of local government regulations of alternative onsite sewage systems (AOSS) found in some local government ordinances.  The official opinion of the Attorney General can be found here.  The preemption [...]

For many years, localities were without authority to adopt a TDR ordinance.  The Attorney General made clear that while a TDR program might be constitutional, a statute would have to be adopted to authorize a locality to adopt a TDR ordinance.  Opinion to the Honorable Robert T. Andrews, 1985-86 Va. A.G. op. 112.  In 2006, such statutes [...]