In (sentencing) memoriam: why I am already missing Justice Scalia

Justice Antonin Scalia was nominated to be a Justice just a few months after I graduated from high school, and I have never really known a Supreme Court without his voice and views being integral to the Court’s work.  And Justice Scalia earned a unique and enduring place in my professional heart with his work for the Court in Blakely v. Washington.  In this 2004 Slate commentary stressing how consequential the ruling was for sentencing law and policy, I called Justice Scalia’s opinion in Blakely “majestic and mysterious, historic and hysterical, stunning and stupefying,” and “a great read [that] often seems more intent on teasing the dissenters than on clearly defining defendants’ Sixth Amendment rights.”

I could (and likely will in some future law review pages) wax even more potetic about the Blakely opinion and about how his work in the Apprendi and Booker lines of cases are likely to long persist as the most critical and consequential constitutional rulings in the modern history of sentencing jurisprudence.  But in this post, I am eager to take a few moments to note and link some highlights in the remarkable corpus of significant sentencing opinions authored by Justice Scalia during his three decades on the high court:

Mistretta v. United States, 488 U.S. 361 (1989) (dissenting)

Stanford v. Kentucky, 492 U.S. 361 (1989) (for the Court)

Harmelin v. Michigan, 501 U.S. 957 (1991) (for the Court and concurring)

Callins v. Collins, 510 U.S. 1141 (1994) (concurring)

Almendarez-Torres v. United States, 523 U.S. 224 (1998) (dissenting)

Apprendi v. New Jersey, 530 U.S. 466 (2000) (concurring)

Ring v. Arizona, 536 U.S. 584 (2002) (concurring)

Blakely v. Washington, 542 U.S. 296 (2004) (for the Court)

Johnson v. United States, 135 S. Ct. 2551 (2015) (for the Court)

By keeping this list focused only on sentencing cases, I have left off many of Justice Scalia’s hugely consequential opinions on lots of other criminal law matters (see, e.g., Crawford and Heller). And, I suspect that some readers think fondly (or perhaps not so fondly) of other Scalia sentencing opinions not listed above. But even this abridged list highlights how profoundly significant Justice Scalia was in shaping modern sentencing jurisprudence.

Prior related post:

• So shocking and so sad: “Antonin Scalia, Supreme Court justice, dies at 79”