SCOTUS preview season in high gear

Everywhere you surf, there are clear signs that the SCOTUS preview season is now in high gear.  Marcia Coyle has this effective article up at law.com entitled "New Supreme Court Term Promises Early Drama."  Also, as How Appealing notes here, the Cato Institute's annual SCOTUS event to place Thursday, and it can now be watched on-line through links here.  Similarly, the annual Supreme Court preview conference at William and Mary School of Law is going on this weekend (details here).

Unsurprisingly, even though SCOTUS has a criminal-heavy docket this fall, as detailed here, most of the preview buzz is focused on issues like abortion, affirmative action and punitive damages.   Still, with fall arguments in big Blakely cases like Cunningham addressing California's sentencing system (archive here) and Burton addressing retroactivity (archive here), I expect there will ultimately be plenty of SCOTUS buzz to feed my Blakely obsessions.

Some recent related posts:

• Joint advice for SCOTUS on Cunningham
• Ideas for starting a SCOTUS fantasy league?
• Time to take some more Blakely and Booker cases....
• A criminal start to OT '06 for SCOTUS
• Getting excited for Cunningham
• Could they, would they, should they ... declare Blakely retroactive?

UPDATE:  In the comments, Kent Scheidegger reminds me of his great work in this post at Crime & Consequences, where Kent details the criminal law cases that Tom Goldstein predicts have a decent chance of a cert grant.  Notably, few of these cases deal with sentencing issues, though I am predict some more sentencing related cert grants before this calender year is complete.