Legal Commentary

I'm home now from the autumnal delights of Falls Village, CT only to be hobbled by terrible sniffles just before class begins this afternoon. Alas, I'm not the Canadian I once was. In any event, I meant to get this up on the blog last week, but better later than never. For the Eighth Amendment fans in the audience, I have recently put up a substantially revised and expanded version of my article, Executing Retributivism, up on SSRN (and forthcoming this spring). There's still a good bit more work to be done toward the end (not to mention editorial work below the line throughout), but I have tried to improve and clarify the argument that Panetti v. Quarterman, a case the SCT decided in 2007, has substantial implications for the constitutional regulation of both capital and non-capital punishments, implications that have not been sufficiently appreciated so far.

To be more clear about my intervention, I am not arguing that the holding in Panetti requires the end of capital punishment or the end of the warehousing of the mentally ill in prisons, to name just two. Rather, my claim is that the ratio decidendi of the decision should lead lower courts and defense lawyers to revisit the rationales currently used to justify some of these practices, which are, to say the least, problematic from a retributive perspective. As there is still time to revise in light of feedback, I'd be grateful for anyone's off-line thoughts.

I have also put up new drafts of some other works in progress: Retributive Damages; How Should Punitive Damages Work?; and Punishing Family Status (with Ethan and Jennifer Collins). The first and third pieces are close to finished (coming out in January and December respectively), but the second piece is still very early on and I'd be grateful for comments on the piece, which offers a sketch of how to redesign the architecture of punitive damages.