I closed my petition for certiorari in Hammon v. Indiana by declaring, " 'We really mean it!' is the message that lower courts need to hear, and that decision of this case can send."

The Supreme Court's consolidated decision in Davis v. Washington and Hammon v. Indiana offers something for everyone: by "splitting the difference" between the two cases—affirming one and reversing the other—the opinion provides much grist for advocates' mills on both sides of this issue.

Prosecutors, defense attorneys, and lower court judges hoped that the Supreme Court's ruling in the consolidated cases of Davis v. Washington and Hammon v. Indiana (hereafter simply Davis) would provide a primer on testimonial hearsay. In retrospect, these hopes were somewhat unrealistic.

In this essay, we consider the potential implications of Davis on two issues relevant to child abuse cases: how the Court's new test for "testimonial" might apply when the statements are by a child claiming abuse and whether statements to non-law enforcement personnel can ever be testimonial. We then briefly identify a few of the many questions left unanswered by the decision. Though Davis certainly has implications for child abuse cases, true clarity will have to wait for yet another day.

When Texas stifled the eager and energized Latino electorate in Laredo, it engaged in a classic form of racial vote dilution. But it also stifled competition, doing harm not just to a racially-informed political community on the cusp of victory, but to all voters in the district for whom vibrant political participation was no longer an option.

The truly unprecedented development in the case for me was Justice Scalia's vote to uphold what he considered a racial classification under the Equal Protection Clause, but one that survived strict scrutiny. This essay tries to explain why his opinion is important, both in its own right and with respect to its implications for how he might consider the upcoming challenges to the newly reauthorized Voting Rights Act.

The Supreme Court's opinions in LULAC v. Perry, the Texas redistricting case, confounded expectation. While many believed that the Court would develop the law governing partisan gerrymandering in one direction or another, it did not. As exactly before, such claims are justiciable but there is no law to govern them.

The Court's difficulty is understandable. Gerrymandering is a challenge to democratic self-government, but judicial intervention requires a judicially manageable theory of democracy compatible with the Constitution and our political institutions. It remains to be seen whether the Court can agree upon such a theory. Vieth and LULAC suggest that the outlook is not promising.

Indeed, there's nothing in LULAC to prevent Texas Republicans from taking yet another bite at the redistricting apple in time for the 2008 election—say by adjusting some lines ever so slightly so as to make it easier to defeat one or more potentially vulnerable Democratic incumbents.

Everyone wants a piece of Tom DeLay. The former majority leader is under investigation and indictment, and even the Supreme Court threatened last Term to undo one of his signal achievements. In 2003, DeLay orchestrated a highly unusual mid-decade revision of Texas's congressional map. The revised map was a boon to Republicans, shifting the Texas congressional delegation from 15 Republicans and 17 Democrats to 21 Republicans and 11 Democrats.

If, as we fear, state and local governments follow the precedent of Texas and engage in unnecessary, wasteful, and acrimonious redistricting using inaccurate population data to benefit partisan interests, we would like to believe the justices will regret their decision in LULAC v. Perry. But we doubt that will happen because there was also an air of unreality about the challenge to the 2003 gerrymander. This is, after all, the Court (and a justice) that assisted George W. Bush into the White House. Could anyone believe it was realistic to expect it (or him) to unseat six Republican Congressmen to assist Nancy Pelosi into the Speaker's Chair?

Kansas law provides that unless a capital sentencing jury concludes that the mitigating factors that apply to the defendant's crime outweigh the aggravating factors, it must sentence the defendant to death.

Since Furman v. Georgia, the Supreme Court has sought to harmonize competing constitutional demands under Eighth Amendment rules regulating the two-step eligibility and selection stages of the capital decision-making process. Furman's demand for rationality and consistency requires that, at the eligibility stage, the sentencer's discretion be limited and guided by clear and objective fact-based standards that rationally narrow the class of death-eligible defendants.

More than three decades ago, in Furman v. Georgia, a sharply divided Supreme Court struck down all existing capital punishment schemes because the results they generated were arbitrary, discriminatory, and unreasoned. No member of that Court remains on the Court today, and the Court has grown increasingly conservative ever since.

Over the last decade, the most important events in American death penalty law have occurred outside the courts. The discovery of numerous wrongfully convicted death-sentenced inmates in Illinois led to the most substantial reflection on the American death penalty system since the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In 1972, in Furman v. Georgia, the Supreme Court deemed it "incontestable" that a death sentence is cruel and unusual if inflicted "by reason of [the defendant's] race, religion, wealth, social position, or class, or if it is imposed under a procedure that gives room for the play of such prejudices."

Hidden underneath the racy death penalty issues in Kansas v. Marsh lurks a seemingly dull procedural issue addressed only in separate opinions by Justices Stevens and Scalia: whether the Court should have heard the case in the first place.