Play Ball!

Major League Baseball may have just wrapped up its regular season and Major League Soccer is winding down as well, but today marks opening day of the most important season: the Supreme Court's new term! For an appellate geek like myself, this is almost like Xmas in October (although not quite as good as June, when the term ends and we get opinions coming out thick and fast). CBS legal analyst Andrew Cohen has a brief (and light-hearted) look at the upcoming term here.

One quibble, however - there was no "landmark 2004 ruling that required federal jurors to find beyond a reasonable doubt any fact that increased a defendant's sentence." The landmark ruling from 2004, Blakely, applied only to state sentencings, not federal. By the time the federal Guidelines got around to the court in Booker a year later, Blakely was emasculated to the point of being nearly meaningless for the feds (as I argued here on the 1-year anniversary of Blakely). Maybe Cunningham, the California case Cohen alludes to, will fix that, but I'm not overly optimistic.