Seventh Circuit Clarifies Sentencing of Wholesale Drug Traffickers, Encourages Dose-Based Approach

Wholesalers often sell drugs in relatively pure form, with the knowledge that retailers will dilute the drugs before reselling them on the street. Indeed, some powerful drugs, like the painkiller fentanyl, must be substantially diluted before they can be safely consumed. For that reason, wholesalers may end up selling much smaller quantities than retailers, at least as measured simply by weight. This presents a dilemma for sentencing, especially in the federal system, where weight drives sentences: should a wholesaler’s sentence be determined by the weight he sold, or by the weight of the diluted form of his product sold on the street?

The question has particular importance in fentanyl cases, as illustrated by the Seventh Circuit’s recent decision in United States v. Alvarado-Tizoc (No. 10-1613). In sentencing the wholesaler-defendants, the district court chose to attribute to them the full retail quantities, which were 11 to 16 times greater than the wholesale quantities.

This was improper, the Seventh Circuit held.  

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Accommodation of Prisoners With Idiosyncratic Religious Beliefs

Under O’Lone v. Estate of Shabazz, 482 U.S. 342 (1987), prison officials may restrict inmates’ religious practices, but such restrictions are constitutionally limited to those that reasonably relate to legitimate penological objectives. The Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act offers additional, statutory protections. But talk of a religious practice normally conjures up the image of an organized religious group acting pursuant to shared beliefs. What are we to make of an inmate who seeks an accommodation based on an indiosyncratic “religious” belief that is not actually espoused by his or her sect? Must an inmate’s belief be officially supported by an organized religious group in order to receive legal protection?

Yes and no, the Seventh Circuit answered last week in Vinning-El v. Evans (No. 10-1681). 

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The Rise of Interdisciplinary Legal Education

[Editor’s Note: This month, we asked a few veteran faculty members to share their reflections on what has changed the most in legal education since they became law professors.  This is the fourth in the series.]

Since 1995, when I first joined Marquette’s law faculty, one of the most obvious changes I have witnessed has been an increase in the interdisciplinary nature of legal scholarship and, not uncoincidentally I believe, the number of interdisciplinary (“law and”) courses that law schools, including Marquette, offer their students.  Certainly these trends were on the rise before 1995, but their present pervasiveness across law school faculties and curricula seems to me to mark a cumulatively significant change.

This development likely has multiple causes.  The influx into law faculties of those holding doctoral degrees in other fields, noted recently by Professor Hylton, is certainly one, although the ready susceptibility of law or legal topics to analysis by these other disciplines suggests that other factors are at work.  One haunting explanation, of course, is that law is perhaps not a genuinely autonomous discipline after all, but rather little more than the procedure-laden application of independent fields of knowledge to the prevention and resolution of conflict.

Whatever its causes, this development likely has also generated multiple consequences, some of which might be seen as benefits, others as costs. 

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