Juvenile Lifers and Judicial Overrreach: A Curmedgeonly Meditation on Miller v. Alabama

This Article focuses very little on the implications of Miller and Graham for the population they most directly affect – juvenile offenders previously eligible for sentences of life without parole – and more on the implications of the Court’s reasoning in Miller and Graham for sentencing generally. However gratifying the results of Miller and Graham may be as sentencing policy, they are troubling as a constitutional matter both because they are badly theorized and because they are two strands of a web of decisions in which the Court has consistently used doubtful constitutional interpretations to transfer power over criminal justice policy from the legislatures – state and federal – to the courts.