The Eighth Amendment and Its Future in a New Age of Punishment

In 2002, the Supreme Court decided Atkins v. Virginia, opening the door to the Court's application of the Eighth Amendment on an almost annual basis - Roper v. Simmons (2005), Kennedy v. Louisiana (2007), Baze v. Rees (2008), Graham v. Florida (2010), Brown v. Plata (2011), Miller v. Alabama (2012), Hall v. Florida (2014), Glossip v. Gross (2015), Moore v. Texas (2017), Bucklew v. Precythe (2019), Timbs v. Indiana (2019), Kahler v. Kansas (2019-20 term), and Mathena v. Malvo (2019-20 term). These decisions generated a number of interesting conversations and papers by many of the contributors to this book. Some particularly memorable conversations included a SEALS panel in the summer of 2011 in Hilton Head, South Carolina, with John Stinneford and Corinna Lain; a Law & Society panel in Boston, Massachusetts in 2013 with Rick Bierschbach and Beth Colgan; a Law & Society panel in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 2014 with Richard Frase; an AALS panel in 2016 in New York City with Corinna Lain, Debby Denno, and Eric Berger; and a Law & Society panel in Washington, DC in 2019 with Corinna Lain and John Bessler. And of course, we should mention the SEALS panel we had in August 2018 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida with many of the contributors in preparation for this volume: Rick Bierschbach, Mike Mannheimer, Debby Denno, John Bessler, Corinna Lain, John Stinneford, and Cara Drinan--