More on SLR and "More Perfect" sentencing

As detailed in this recent post, the October issue of the Stanford Law Review is a symposium bringing together many leading sentencing scholars in a project entitled "A More Perfect System: Twenty-Five Years of Guidelines Sentencing Reform."  More details on this amazing issue, which includes my recent offense/offender article, are now available here at the SLR website. 

At the SLR website, you can find a press release and an informational letter and the issue's table of contents.  In addition, you can also access the issue's substantive introduction authored by Professors Robert Weisberg and Marc Miller.  This article is entitled "Sentencing Lessons," and here is a passage from this terrific piece's introduction:

Sentencing has become a complex and varied field, and the world of sentencing law — indeed much of legal world — looks very different in 2005 than it did thirty years ago before the first modern structured-sentencing system was created.  The Stanford Law Review editors believed that leading sentencing scholars could articulate the key lessons from all modern sentencing reforms and offer their knowledge in the form of collective and structured scholarly testimony to Congress.  While Congress and the federal system are the principal audience for this Issue, we believe the insights in these chapters have much to offer judges, scholars, policymakers, and lawyers at both the state and federal levels.

Produced in conjunction with the new Stanford Criminal Justice Center, this Issue reflects such an effort to restate the major lessons about sentencing reform from the past twenty-five years, and to do so in a manner that will assist further efforts at reform. Authors were invited to address specific topics so that the entire Issue would encompass the core philosophical, structural, policy, and practical lessons and challenges in designing a successful sentencing system.  The chapters in this Issue address the various purposes of sentencing, the special role of federal criminal justice in our federal system, the institutions and actors at the rulemaking and adjudicative stages (including Congress, the Commission, trial and appellate judges, and advocates), and the basic substantive and structural elements of sentencing systems. In conceiving this Issue, our goal was to provide an overview of knowledge about all essential aspects of the federal system....

We offer this Issue in the hope that Congress will look seriously at revising the federal system in light of Blakely and Booker and that, in the spirit of the SRA, Congress will want to draw on contemporary expertise and the evolving "intellectual history" of sentencing knowledge in further reforming the federal sentencing system.