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W.Va. Supreme Court lays down LAWS in Morgantown

Sayje Mansberry, Josephine Wolfe and Kayleigh Kinsley-Davis didn’t ask to approach the bench Wednesday morning at WVU’s College of Law.

Instead, the bench approached them – with a question.

“Hey, guys,” West Virginia Supreme Court Chief Justice Beth Walker said.

“You’re gonna lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance, right?”

“Yes, ma’am,” replied the trio, who are all Brownie members Girl Scout Troop 10256 in the Morgantown area.

Sayje, Josephine, and Kayleigh were the part of the color guard that jazzed up a judicial road trip for Walker and her fellow justices on the highest court in the Mountain State.

It was an academic homecoming, of sorts, for just about all of the justices, save for Walker.

She’s the only who went to a law school other than the one on the Evansdale campus.

“We love getting up to Morgantown,” Justice John Hutchison said, “but mainly we just like getting out across West Virginia.”

The justices were in town for its outreach program known as Legal Advancement for West Virginia Students – or, “LAWS,” for short.

LAWS has been around since 1999, when justices started fanning out to courthouses and other legal venues in all 55 counties to hear actual cases open to the actual public.

COVID put it into a two-year recess in 2020 and 2021 but now it is back strong, Hutchison said.

“We want our court to approachable and accessible,” he said.

“We want to demystify the process. We want the public to know just what we do.”

What the audience of high school students from across Monongalia and Preston counties saw the High Court doing in the Marlyn E. Lugar Courtroom was what it always does: Poring over every precedent, and every bit of accompanying case law, for the argument at hand.

Two arguments were heard that morning.

The first regarded a road in a “No Man’s Land” area of Charleston – the aforementioned, due to a zoning quirk – and justices were asked to reconsider an earlier decision in a lower court that said the capital city wasn’t responsible for snow removal, pothole repair and other maintenance for the residents who live along it.

It was a literal matter of death in the matter of the second case that went before the court.

Petitioners asked for another day in court for a man indicted earlier for first-degree murder. While he was present when a person had, in fact, died from a gunshot, his counsel said, he wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger.

Rae Root, a Morgantown High senior who was in that audience, said she was awed by the respect afforded to both cases by the justices.

“The case about the street could have been boring,” she said, “but it wasn’t.”

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