Around the blogosphere on a friday afternoon

To close out an exciting week (at least for baseball fans), I see a lot of interesting items around the blogosphere:

• There are a lot of new posts on a lot of the Federal Defender Blogs, especially at the blogs of the Second Circuit, the Sixth Circuit, the Ninth Circuit, and the Eleventh Circuit.

• At INCourts, Michael Ausbrook has the goods here and here on the cert briefing coming from Indiana’s Smylie case, which concerns the applicability of Blakely to consecutive sentencing.

• From How Appealing, this link connects you to a news story and an opinion from Nebraska which invalidates a sentence because the legislature went too far during a special session convened to respond to the Supreme Court’s Ring ruling.

• Over at PrawfsBlawg, Kaimi Wenger asks in this post about the constitutionality of Texas judge’s  probation condition that a 17-year-old drug offender “not have sex as long as she is living with her parents and attending school.”

• Professor Jack Balkin here is talking up blogs as scholarship (responding to The Faculty Blog forthcoming from the Chicago law faculty).  Faithful readers might recall that I recently riffed here and here on this topic when guest-blogging at PrawfsBlawg.