Retroactive Ameliorative Sentencing:  Doug Berman posts a link on Sentencing Law and Policy to an SSRN article that addresses "the retroactive application of new sentencing rules that reduce sentences..."  The article, "In With the New, Out With the Old: Expanding the Scope of Retroactive Amelioration," written by S.David Mitchell, discusses how a majority of jurisdictions do not apply ameliorative sentencing changes retroactively unless there is clear legislative intent, but courts in a minority of jurisdictions, "[d]issatisfied with this approach," apply ameliorative sentencing changes "despite the existence of a general saving statute in contravention of the rules of statutory construction..."  Mitchell points out that some may label this judicial activism.  He advocates "for ameliorative sentencing changes to be applied to pre-final judgment defendants adopting the current minority legislative practice and to those with finalized convictions through an administrative sentence readjustment process."  

Always a Judge:  Thanks to Tony Mauro, at Blog of Legal Times, for including a link, in the Morning Wrap, to Jess Bravin's Wall Street Journal article on former-Justice O'Connor's post-retirement career.  According to Bravin, since she retired, Justice O'Connor "has been visiting federal appellate courts across the country, filling in as a substitute judge when vacations or vacancies leave their three-member panels understaffed."  To date, she has heard nearly 80 cases and written more than a dozen opinions.  Occasionally the former-Justice gets to apply rules established by cases she heard in the Supreme Court.  O'Connor told Bravin, "I now have occasion to have to apply some of those [Supreme Court] holdings with which I didn't agree when they were made, but of course now they're binding...It hasn't caused me to change my mind on a previous dissent. But that's water over the dam."  In 1937, Congress authorized retired justices to serve as substitutes on lower courts.  Justice O'Connor is one of the few to take advantage of the opportunity.  Ashby Jones at Wall Street Journal's Law Blog also posts this link to Bravin's "enlightening read."

"Cool Forthcoming Article" Discussing Ambiguity and Legal Interpretation:  Orin Kerr posts on Volokh Conspiracy that Ward Farnsworth, Dustin F. Guzior, and Anup Malani will soon have an article in The Journal of Legal Analysis "investigat[ing] the crucial and analytically prior question of what ambiguity in law is."  The abstract notes that while "[m]ost scholarship on statutory interpretation discusses what courts should do with ambiguous statutes[,]" people can have different interpretations of what makes a law ambiguous - is it that it is unclear to a judge, or is it unclear to ordinary readers of English, as a group?  Apparently, from a survey given to 1,000 law students, the authors found "that asking respondents whether a statute is 'ambiguous' in their own minds produces answers that are strongly biased by their policy preferences. But asking respondents whether the text would likely be read the same way by ordinary readers of English does not produce answers biased in this way."  Farnsworth, Guzior and Malani write, "This discrepancy leads to important questions about which of those two ways of thinking about ambiguity is more legally relevant."

Au Revoir to The Ninth Justice:  The Editor of The Ninth Justice informs readers that with Justice Sonia Sotomayor sworn in as the 111th justice of the Supreme Court, the website "is going dark."  It's resources, news and updates will be available in its archives.  Thanks for four months of great commentary and coverage.  Similar political blogs can be found at National Journal Online.