Welcome to Lammers' Virginia Criminal Cases & Law. This is primarily a site which will concentrate on Virginia's various criminal legal developments through case law.

The menu across the top is my permanent list. If you click on any of these you will find a page which will allow you to access a list of cases which explain different parts of criminal law. I plan to update the permanent list every January.

On the right side you will see a link to my blog CrimLaw. Below that is a list of months which will link to decisions from that month and will eventually go back cyclically for two years (starting January 2010); this will fill in cases which have not yet made it into the top menu. At the bottom are some topics tangentially applicable to criminal law.

I began working on this list in March 2009 and have not gone back to fill in gaps. If, in the course of work or studies, I discover an interesting or pertinent case I will try to enter it, but this is primarily a prospective endeavor not a retrospective one. I have to work and this site is not paying my bills; thus, I can only put so much time into it.

Citations: No, I do not use the Bluebook, Maroonbook, etc. citation format. Because most research  is now done online, these proprietary, book based formats are embarrassingly archaic. I can't make appellate courts switch to a case number, paragraph citation format, but that does not mean I cannot use one myself. The citation I use is as follows: Party v. Party 2, MonthYear, Court Case number. The courts are as follows: USSC= United States Supreme Court; VaSC= Virginia Supreme Court; VaApp= Virginia Court of Appeals; and 4Cir= The 4th Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. Open your electronic legal resource (remember, if you are in the Virginia Bar Fastcase is free) limit it to the court in question and search for the case number.

When to expect Summaries of New Cases: This will not be an up to the second listing. The general plan is to wait until the end of the month and then gather all the decisions from USSC, VaSC, VaApp, and 4Cir and then sort through them to eliminate civil and non-Virginia matters. Then I will try to get them entered before the end of the next month. Things may be delayed depending on work or other intervening issues.

CrimLaw: This is an outgrowth of my blog, Crimlaw, and a project I'm doing for a CLE. I've been doing CrimLaw since 2003 and it has everything in it from legal analysis and opinion, to personal legal stories, to just plain silly things which have caught my eye. I intend to keep most of that over there and do summations of cases here (you can click here to go to CrimLaw).