Colgan on Retroactive Sentencing for Juvenile Offenders

A month ago, I linked to a short post I wrote for the New York Times about retroactive sentencing for juvenile offenders under Miller v. Alabama. In the piece, I was skeptical that the Court’s decision would be retroactive under federal law, since the Supreme Court’s decision focused on the right to a hearing.

My former Stanford colleague Beth Colgan now has a piece in the UCLA Law Review Online, making the opposite case. She argues that Alleyne v. United States — a decision from last term about mandatory minimums and jury trials — has surprising implications for retroactivity analysis. I’m not sure I agree, but Colgan’s article is the best thing I’ve read on that side of the debate.

By the way, you may have noticed that online law reviews are publishing a lot these days, and they seem to be where a lot of the shorter (sometimes very short) scholarship is going — a fact that may be relevant to the debate about article length below. For more thoughts on the changing role of online law reviews, see this post by Howard Wasserman.

Powered by WordPress. Designed by Woo Themes