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Is Blakely showing its age as it turns four?

By Douglas A. Berman

Today marks the four-year anniversary of the Supreme Court's profoundly important constitutional ruling in Blakely v. Washington.  Its jurisprudential godfather, Apprendi v. New Jersey, will turn eight on Thursday.  Both merit re-reading as a fitting celebration of their birth and jurisprudential development. Though my first post on the Blakely case, headlined "Blakely..... WOW!!", still captures my feelings about the ruling, the passage of time has me rethinking my assertion in this July 2004 Slate commentary that "Blakely is the biggest criminal justice decision not just of this past term, not just of this decade, not just of the Rehnquist Court, but perhaps in the history of the Supreme Court."  (Notice that I included the term "perhaps," ever aware that I might later need to back-track from such an extreme assertion...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on June 24, 2008 (boomark / email).