Osler's Razor

I'm here in Redondo Beach, speaking at the federal defender's National Sentencing Workshop. Intriguingly, my co-presenters are Frank Bowman, Michael O'Hear, and Judge Nancy Gertner. Federal sentencing is a small world, and I go back a ways with all of them. Bowman and I testified together before the US Sentencing Commission in 2004, on the eve of the Supreme Court's Bookerdecision. After our testimony, a mysterious character from the Heritage Foundation took the two of us and Doug Berman to a very nice lunch. It was like being a lobbyist for a day! It kind of made me itchy.

Michael O'Hear, of course, was my collaborator on the Kimbrough brief (which will be heard by the Supreme Court on October 2), and Judge Gertner and I sparred many years ago at the Yale sentencing seminars.

What is really fascinating here is the experiences of the federal defenders. I'm learning quite clearly that procedures and practices vary a lot from one area of the country to another. It's kind of shocking how differently a case from Texas, for example might be treated differently than one from Washington, even within the supposedly unified federal system.