Good to be home, with more perspectives

I am back home on East Coast time, and still giddy from experiencing the wonderful Stanford Roundtable conference organized by Professor Robert Weisberg. The plans are to have some written product from the whole conference in the near future (perhaps for the Federal Sentencing Reporter and/or the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law), so that those not able to attend can get a sense of the Blakely ground so effectively covered.

And the long plane ride home gave me a chance to think through more fully the offense/offender distinction that I believe provides a sound and appropriate way to conceptualize (and narrow) the import and impact of Blakely. I hope to have a chance to write up more fully (and more clearly) the ideas I started to set out here last night.

One very interesting insight I returned home with concerns the fact that it seems most legal academics writing about sentencing are former federal prosecutors or at least spent some time in the U.S. Department of Justice. At the Stanford conference, I discovered that Professors Alschuler, Bibas, Bowman, Chanenson, Klein, Little, Miller, Richman, Stith, and Wright all had either been federal prosecutors or worked for DOJ. Though these professors’ views were certainly not uniform, they all were clearly influenced by their prior professional service. And confirming that biographies influence perspective, in this audio piece from NPR Eric Vos, an assistant federal defender in Pennsylvania, reveals how at least one defense attorney views the operation of the existing federal sentencing guidelines.