Effect of Blakely in Ohio: Doug Berman at Sentencing Law and Policy posted on the Ohio Supreme Court's decision in State v. Hairston, No. 2008-Ohio-2338 (Ohio May 21, 2008). The decision upheld a 134 year prison sentence for a man who tied up four people while ransacking their homes. The decision held that the sentence did not violate "the U.S. constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment." Berman posted on the decision because of the dicta in the case calls for a reform to the sentencing laws Ohio had implemented in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Blakely v. Washington. Of particular interest, is the concurring opinion of Judge Lanzinger, who writes: "When a defendant is convicted of multiple offenses, the community may now expect maximum and consecutive prison terms as the default sentence. It will take a courageous judge not to “max and stack” every sentence in multiple-count cases...." A 134 year sentence seems like a good policy argument for allowing some judicial discretion in sentencing - until one reads the press report detailing the details of Hairston's offense.

Best State High Courts: Hat-tip to Lawrence Solum at Legal Theory Blog for directing us to a Stephen J. Choi , G. Mitu Gulati and Eric A. Posner paper ranking the best and worst high courts in the country. The paper ranks the high courts of the fifty states during the years 1998-2000. The abstract and text of the article can be found at SSRN.

Any attempt to measure objectively an elusive concept such as quality of a court is going to be problematic. This paper has a three-part measure: productivity, defined as published opinions per judge per year, "influence or opinion-quality," defined by citations from other jurisdictions, and "independence." The last factor is intriguingly defined by considering a judge independent if he frequently votes with judges of the other party. Applying this operational definition to the U.S. Supreme Court, for example, would result in Justice Stevens (appointed by Republican Gerald Ford) being rated more "independent" than, say, Justice Thomas because Stevens more often votes with Democrat-appointees Ginsburg and Breyer. The validity of this measure is debatable.

Hillary on the Court?: The Washington Post published a column today by Andrew Miller where Miller proposed that should Obama get the Democratic nomination, a surefire way to appease Clinton supporters would be to place Hillary on the Supreme Court. Matthew Franck over at Bench Memos posted his thoughts on the suggestion. Franck's post hypothesizes that such a deal would be a "gift" to John McCain and the Republican Party in the upcoming election. Franck also points out that a commitment to appoint a Justice this early on would put Obama on the record as treating "the Court [as] just another political institution like any other."