Judging through the Blakely/blogsphere lens

A fascinating (side) story in the whole Blakely saga has been the amazing lens it creates for questions of judicial roles and responsibilities. I have not had much time to blog about these matters, though I have discussed briefly here the interesting and questionable use of “unpublished” opinion to address consequential Blakely issues.

Helpfully, some fellow bloggers are zeroing in on some of these interesting judging subjects. For example, Chris Geidner at Law Dork has this great post which, in a sense, defends the Sixth Circuit’s Koch opinion on “judging” grounds. The whole post deserves attention, but I especially liked this pithy summary of Koch: “The Sixth Circuit ruling means: Let the Supreme Court be the tailor.”

Similarly, Ken Lammers over at CrimLaw has this interesting post linking what he calls anti-Blakely positions to anti-Exclusionary Rule arguments. With rhetorical force, Ken contends: “The purpose of both [arguments] is to give theoretical cover to acts which in practice violate the constitution. It’s asking the court to accept Plessy style reasoning in a Brown world.”