A few of my scholarly thoughts on Rita

I was honored to be asked by students at the Denver University Law Review to contribute my thoughts about the Supreme Court’s work in Rita v. United States, and very pleased that the students at DULR were eager to get a special issue on Rita to press before the Court heard Gall and Kimbrough.  My contribution, entitled “Rita, Reasoned Sentencing, and Resistance to Change,” is now available at this link.

I will do a number of future posts about my piece and the other terrific pieces that DULR has assembled in short order, but for now let me just provide this snippet from my introduction:

As explained in Part I below, the Booker remedy transformed a constitutional debate into a multi-dimensional cacophony of sentencing issues that Rita could only begin to address.  Moreover, as detailed in Part II, though Rita does answer a few key post-Booker questions, the opinions in Rita have passages that present new puzzles for anyone trying to sort through the post-Booker world of federal sentencing.  Finally, as discussed in Part III, Rita and lower courts’ early reactions to the decision ultimately reveal, yet again, that dramatic legal changes face resistance from sentencing actors who become acclimated to the status quo. Indeed, the history of modern federal sentencing reforms demonstrates that changes in legal doctrines become revolutionary only when they ultimately transform the legal cultures in which these doctrines operate.  This lesson should be heeded not only by the Supreme Court as it considers another set of sentencing cases, but also by all would-be legal reformers in the field of sentencing and beyond.