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55 Crim. L. Bull. 883 (2019)
The Prison Case Law of the U.S. Courts of Appeals, 2018

handle is hein.journals/cmlwbl55 and id is 887 raw text is: Correctional Law Commentary The Prison Case Law of the U.S. Courts of Appeals, 2018 James E. Robertson* I. INTRODUCTION The U.S. courts of appeals are no longer the forlorn bridesmaids of the judiciary. Once described as the least noticed of the regular constitutional courts, they have been in the glare of the cameras because of President Trump's clarion call to transform the federal judiciary into a bastion of conservatism.' Their importance in significant part resides in the laws of probability: only the rarest litigant gets his or her case heard by the one court superior to all of the U.S. courts of appeals, making them the effective court of last resort if you play the averages, with only eighty cases receiving a full, plenary review of the some 7,000 cases *Distinguished Faculty Scholar and Professor of Corrections Emeritus at Min- nesota State University. Professor Robertson received law diplomas from Oxford University and, earlier, Washington University in St. Louis. He was the Editor-in- Chief of the Criminal Law Bulletin from 2003 to 2015. He is presently a contributing editor to the Correctional Law Reporter and Criminal Law Bulletin. Unless otherwise indicated, internal quotation marks, citations, and footnotes have been omitted from quoted matter. Portions of this Article previously appeared in the Correction Law Reporter. They are used with the gracious permission of the Civic Research Institute. See James E. Robertson, Pat-Down Searches and Eighth Amendment in the Me-Too Era, 31 CORREcTIONAL L. RPT. 9 (2019); James E. Robertson, Prisoner Pen Pal Services, the First Amendment, and Experience-Based Evidence of Reasonable- ness, 30 CORRECTIONAL L. RPT. 89 (2019); James E. Robertson, You Don't Have to Snitch: The Birth of a New Right, 30 CORRECTIONAL L. RPT. 73 (2019); James E. Robertson, Looking Back at Holt v. Sarver: The Transformation of Failure-to-Protect Law, 30 CORRECTIONAL L. RPT. 57 (2018-2019); James E. Robertson, Dope Sick in Jail: Opiate Withdrawal as Unconstitutional Punishment, 30 CORRECTIONAL L. RPT. 41 (2018); James E. Robertson, The Better Path of Kingsley v. Hendrickson, 30 CORRECTIONAL L. RPT. 9 (2018). See Charlie Savage, Trump Is Rapidly Reshaping the Judiciary. Here's How, N.Y. TIMES, Nov. 11, 2017, https://www.nvtimes.com/2017/11/11/us/politics/trump-udi ciary-appeals-courts-conservatives.html: While the two parties have been engaged in a tit-for-tat escalation of hardball politics over judicial nominations since the Reagan years, the Trump administration is completing a fundamental transformation of the enterprise. And the consequences may go beyond his chance to leave an outsize stamp on the judiciary. When Democrats regain power, if they follow the same playbook and systematically appoint outspoken liberal judges, the ap- peals courts will end up as ideologically split as congress is today. 0 2019 Thomson Reuters 9 criminal Law Bulletin Vol. 55 No. 5 883

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