Tracking Blakely decisions

With most of the federal circuit courts still not fully articulating their views on Blakely (background here), almost all of the most informative and thoughtful federal Blakely decisions have come from the federal district courts (details here). And in my efforts to track the work of federal district courts, I have gained a real education on the vagaries of the on-line legal world.

For example, the difference in the coverage and timing of district court opinions appearing on Lexis and Westlaw has sometimes been startling — e.g., a search this afternoon of “Blakely & Sentenc!” after June 24, 2004 produces 76 district court “hits” on Lexis and only 70 “hits” on Westlaw.

In addition, a good number of consequential district court opinions seem to take many days before appearing on either of these services — e.g., Jason Hernandez here reports on the noteworthy case of US v. Paulus, No. 04-CR-083, 2004 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 16427 (E.D. Wis., Aug. 6, 2004), which escaped my notice perhaps in part because it took at least a week to appear on-line. (I am very thankful Jason found and discussed PaulusBlakely in the context of an upward departure from the guidelines, and it may merit its own separate post later tonight.)

I feel incredibly lucky and thankful that many readers have sent me directly important Blakely decisions and orders, and I want to encourage these kind acts so that I can stay abreast of Blakely developments. For it seems that even in our on-line world, being connected still means a lot more than just having internet access.