Legal Commentary

The last two weeks or so I've been revising my second installment of the Retributive Damages series, this one entitled, How Should Punitive Damages Work? (An earlier working version was called Implementing Retributive Damages, but I've since reframed the discussion--I hope Jason Solomon proves correct!)

In any event, I also wrote from scratch (for the first time in a long while) a new essay that argues that the reasoning in the Supreme Court's decision last year in Panetti v. Quarterman entails the end of the death penalty. The odd part, so far as I can tell, is that nobody's recognized the significance of Panetti for charting the end of capital punishment. (If somebody has, please let me know stat!)

Anyway, the essay is about 30 pages long, or around 20,000 words, and I would really be curious to get the reactions to this paper from people who work closer to the SCT doctrine than I normally do. So if you're interested and have some familiarity with criminal law or the death penalty in particular, and have some time to read it in the very near future, I'd be grateful if you let me know, and I'll email it to you.  I will be doing a very early works in progress talk about it on Monday at FSU and will probably share some more of the paper next week here or on SSRN. Thanks.