Professor Robert Leider, who writes in both constitutional law and criminal law, passed along these comments on the Supreme Court's recent oral argument in an excessive force case and I thought readers might be interested in them:
For scholars of both criminal law and federal courts, the Supreme Court's oral argument yesterday in Barnes v. Felix will be noteworthy. The Supreme Court appears dangerously close to sleepwalking into a major revision of police self-defense law. For federal courts scholars, meanwhile, yesterday's oral argument stood as a painful reminder of how the Court has corrupted certiorari review by detaching itself from deciding actual cases.
