This week the Supreme Court considered, in Dorsey v. United States and Hill v. United States, whether the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 applies retroactively to those prisoners sentenced before the act took effect. A number of media outlets reported on the oral arguments, including Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSBlog; Adam Liptak at the New York Times; Mike [...]
In a big loss for the federal government, the Supreme Court held today that when the government attaches a GPS device to a vehicle to monitor the vehicle's movement, the government conducts a Fourth Amendment search. Justice Scalia wrote the opinion for the Court in United States v. Jones, No. 10-1259, backed by the Chief Justice, [...]
It appears that we may have finally reached a consensus on the simple proposition that the War On Drugs is bad policy. Well, kind of. I know what you’re thinking, are there really people out there who believe that the drug war is good policy? Unfortunately, yes, especially if they happen to [...]
Ross Guberman is President of Legal Writing Pro, Adjunct Professor at George Washington University Law School, and author of Point Made: How to Write Like the Nation’s Top Advocates. I learned of Ross’s work after reading an essay entitled “Five Ways to Write Like John Roberts.” In the essay, Ross distills five [...]
If we release prisoners to relieve overcrowding, then prisoners will rape, rob and murder our citizens. That is frightening; therefore we shouldn’t release prisoners, even though the State cannot afford to humanely incarcerate them. This argument was at the heart of Justices Scalia and Alito’s dissenting opinions last week in the California prison [...]