They wrote the rules so the government never has to answer for its silence.

They wrote the rules so the government never has to answer for its silence.

On August 14, a Henrico Circuit Court judge denied our motion for default judgment against the Virginia Board of Physical Therapy.

• Not because the Board showed up on time.
• Not because the Board filed a single responsive pleading.
• Not because the Board contested a single fact or legal error in the Petition.

The Board was properly served on February 13, 2026. It filed nothing for months and still has not. In any normal civil case in Virginia, that silence would have put the defendant in default. The allegations would have been treated as established. Judgment could have been entered.

But the Board is not a normal defendant. It is the State.

And the State wrote itself a special escape hatch.

Rule 2A:5(3) of the Rules of the Supreme Court of Virginia says that when a state agency fails to respond within 21 days, the appeal is simply “deemed submitted.”

• No answer required.
• No default.
• No consequence.

The agency can ignore the citizen, force the citizen to notice a hearing just to drag it into court, and still walk in months later and pretend it never had an obligation to appear.

A private citizen who did exactly what the Board did would have lost the right to contest the case.

The government gets a free pass.

This is not a technicality. This is a structural double standard written into the rules of court so that the State can delay, obstruct, and impose additional injury on the very people already harmed by its actions. While a licensee sits under restrictive conditions the Board itself never properly voted on, the Board is allowed to sit silent and run out the clock.

They suspended a physical therapist.

They imposed conditions that were never adopted in open session.

They let the official who signed the charges participate in the closed-door deliberations. 

Then, when that therapist exercised his statutory right to appeal, they ignored the petition for months — and the rules protected them for doing it.

This is how power protects itself.

The judge signaled that the underlying challenges have merit.

• The lack of a public vote.
• The participation of the accuser in the deliberations.
• The vague and unvoted conditions.

Those issues are still alive. But the Board was allowed to force a months-long delay simply by doing nothing, because the rules give the State an advantage no private party receives.

This is not neutral procedure.

This is the government writing the rules so that it never has to face the same consequences it imposes on everyone else.

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Sign if you haven’t.

Demand that the General Assembly and the Supreme Court of Virginia end this double standard.

No agency should be allowed to ignore a properly served petition for months and still escape default while a private citizen would have lost the case for the identical silence.

The State does not get to write itself out of the rules that bind the rest of us.