Death Penalty Studies:  At Sentencing Law and Policy, Doug Berman provides links to two new death penalty papers. A new deterrence study is noted in Kent's post here. The other paper, Science and the Death Penalty: DNA, Innocence, and the Debate over Capital Punishment in the United States, suggests that the quest of "abolitionists and death penalty reformers, who seek to promote a 'scientific' death penalty centered on DNA evidence, draw[s] upon a mythologized notion of 'science' as a producer of epistemic certainty."  The authors find this notion paradoxical because the "association of science with certainty is inconsistent with contemporary notions of science as characterized by efforts to measure, manage, but always acknowledge, uncertainty."

Judge Sotomayor's Senate Questionnaire:  Amy Harder has posted the Supreme Court nominee's completed questionnaire at The Ninth Justice.  She also links to its Appendix.  According to the White House, Judge Sotomayor completed the questionnaire in just nine days -- faster than any recent nominee.  Apparently, Chief Justice Roberts took 13 days to finish his questionnaire, Justice Ginsburg needed 15 days, and Justice Alito required 30 days to complete each respective Senate Judiciary Questionnaire.  David Ingram at Blog of Legal Times also discusses Judge Sotomayor's questionnaire.  Ingram reports that the questionnaire describes Judge Sotomayor's nomination process - including the fact that Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Ranking Member Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) sent the questionnaire to Sotomayor quickly, requiring only a day to finalize questions they wanted her to answer.

NRA Appeals Seventh Circuit Ruling:  Eugene Volokh writes at Volokh Conspiracy "Well, That Was Quick" as he reports on the NRA's petition to appeal the Seventh Circuit's holding in NRA v. Chicago.  Tuesday afternoon, in an opinion written by Judge Easterbrook, the Seventh Circuit declined to second-guess old Supreme Court precedents that limited the Second Amendment to a restriction on federal laws, reasoning that "the Supreme Court has rebuffed requests to apply the Second Amendment to the states."  The NRA released a press release detailing its petition for certiorari yesterday.  At SCOTUSblog, Lyle Denniston reports that the NRA is asking the Court to decide one question: "Whether the right of the people to keep and bear arms guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution is incorporated into the Due Process Clause or the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment so as to be applicable to the States, thereby invalidating ordinances prohibiting possession of handguns in the home."