News Summary

• Judges are supposed to decide on the basis of the facts before them.
• Increasingly, they're asking what should happen in various what-ifs.
• Hypotheticals involve imagining edge cases that have never arisen.
• This makes it easier to strike down laws in principle rather than to assess how they function in practice.
• A better approach would be to consult a detailed U.S. federal sentencing guidelines.
• In the U.K., judges have developed informal “sentencing ranges’