Sentencing Law and Policy: Cases, Statutes, and Guidelines, Fifth Edition

Nora V. Demleitner

Nora Demleitner began her tenure as president of St. John’s College’s Annapolis campus in January of 2022. She is St. John’s first female president, the 25th Annapolis president in the college’s 325-year history, and the ninth since the inception of the current Program of study in 1937.

Demleitner, formerly Roy L. Steinheimer Jr. Professor of Law at Washington and Lee University School of Law and dean of the law schools at Hofstra and Washington and Lee, came to the U.S. from Germany in search of a small college that offered a broad liberal arts education. After receiving a B.A. in American Studies from Bates College, she received her J.D. from Yale and her LL.M. from Georgetown in international and comparative law.

An expert on criminal justice issues, including sentencing guidelines, she is an editor of the Federal Sentencing Reporter and served on the editorial board of the American Journal of Comparative Law. Demleitner has published extensively, and her articles have appeared in the Stanford Law Review, The Conversation, and the Washington Post.

Douglas A. Berman

ssor Douglas A. Berman attended Princeton University and Harvard Law School. In law school, he was an editor and developments office chair of the Harvard Law Review and also served as a teaching assistant for a Harvard University philosophy course. After graduation from law school in 1993, Professor Berman served as a law clerk for Judge Jon O. Newman and then for Judge Guido Calabresi, both on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. After clerking, Professor Berman was a litigation associate at the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton, and Garrison in New York City.

Professor Berman is currently the Robert J. Watkins/Procter & Gamble Professor of Law at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. Professor Berman’s principal teaching and research focus is in the area of criminal law and criminal sentencing, though he also has teaching and practice experience in the fields of legislation and intellectual property. He has taught Criminal Law, Criminal Punishment and Sentencing, Criminal Procedure – Investigation, The Death Penalty, Legislation, Introduction to Intellectual Property, Second Amendment Seminar, and the Legislation Clinic.

Professor Berman is the co-author of a casebook, Sentencing Law and Policy: Cases, Statutes and Guidelines, which is published by Aspen Publishers and is now in its fourth edition. In addition to authoring numerous publications on topics ranging from capital punishment to the federal sentencing guidelines, Professor Berman has served as an editor of the Federal Sentencing Reporter for more than a decade, and also now serves as co-managing editor of the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law.

During the 1999-2000 school year, Professor Berman received The Ohio State University Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching, which is given to only 10 people each year from an eligible pool of nearly 3,000 faculty members. Professor Berman was one of the youngest faculty members to ever receive this award, and he was subsequently asked to chair the university committee that selected recipients in the 2002-03 school year.

Professor Berman is the sole creator and author of the widely-read and widely-cited blog, Sentencing Law and Policy. The blog now receives nearly 100,000 page views per month (and had over 20,000 hits the day of the Supreme Court’s major sentencing decision in United States v. Booker). Professor Berman’s work on the Sentencing Law and Policy blog, which he describes as a form of &"scholarship in action,” has been profiled or discussed at length in articles appearing in the Wall Street Journal, Legal Affairs magazine, Lawyers Weekly USA, Legal Times, Columbus Monthly, and in numerous other print and online publications.

In addition, Sentencing Law and Policy has the distinction of being the first blog cited by the U.S. Supreme Court (for a document appearing exclusively on the site), and substantive analysis in particular blog posts has been cited in numerous appellate and district court rulings, in many briefs submitted to federal and state courts around the country, and in dozens of law review articles.

Professor Berman frequently is consulted by national and state policymakers, sentencing commissioners, and public policy groups concerning sentencing law and policy reforms. He has testified before the U.S. House of Representatives and before numerous sentencing commissions. He also is frequently contacted by media concerning sentencing developments by national and local media concerning sentencing developments.

In recent years, Professor Berman has appeared on national television and radio news programs and has been extensively quoted in newspaper articles appearing in nearly every major national paper and many local papers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Legal Times, and in pieces from the Associated Press, Reuters, and Knight-Ridder news services.

Professor Berman sometimes serves as a consultant to lawyers working on important or interesting sentencing cases. In most instances, Professor Berman’s consulting has been on an ad hoc and pro bono basis, and it usually involves a quick review of draft briefs and other court filings and then providing general advice on litigation strategies. On some occasions, however, Professor Berman has been formally retained to play a more sustained role in certain cases, including being retained by law firms to provide consulting service on various cutting-edge federal sentencing i

Ronald Wright

Ronald F. Wright is the Needham Y. Gulley Professor of Criminal Law and the Associate Dean for Research and Academic Programs at Wake Forest University School of Law. He graduated Yale Law School and was an editor of the Yale Law Journal. Ron is the co-author of two casebooks in criminal procedure and sentencing; his empirical research concentrates on the work of criminal adjudication professionals: criminal prosecutors, public defender offices, and judicial administration. He is a board member of the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution, and works with other organizations to help prosecutors enact their reform vision in their own offices. Prior to joining the faculty at Wake Forest University, he was a trial attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice, prosecuting antitrust and other white-collar criminal cases.

Marc L. Miller

Marc L. Miller is the Dean & Ralph W. Bilby Professor of Law at the University of Arizona College of Law. Dean Miller taught at Emory University Law School from 1988-2005, where he served as Associate Dean for Faculty and Scholarship (2003-2005). He is a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School and Pomona College, and grew up in Los Angeles.

Dean Miller writes and teaches about environmental law and policy and criminal law and policy. He is the author of more than 70 articles and essays on a wide range of environmental, criminal justice, immigration and legal theory topics. He is editor of several casebooks on criminal procedure and sentencing, and co-founded the Federal Sentencing Reporter, the leading journal on sentencing law and policy and a joint project of the Vera Institute of Justice and the University of California Press. He currently serves as a series editor for Summits—books focused on the intersection of environmental science, law, and policy.

Dean Miller's scholarship addresses the nature of law. On the criminal side, current work includes a series of articles on the role and regulation of prosecutorial discretion, including a multi-year empirical evaluation of prosecutorial decision-making. At a more general theoretical level, this work deals with policymaking within executive branch agencies, especially in those areas not readily amenable to external judicial or legislative review. His environmental work highlights topics at the intersection of environmental science, policy, and law with special attention to the concept of sustainability and to the relationship between science and environmental policy-making. Much of his environmental work is done in collaboration with natural and social scientists.

At Arizona, Dean Miller serves as co-director of the Arizona Law Program in Criminal Law and Policy, and has joint and affiliated appointments with the University of Arizona Institute of the Environment, the Environmental Health Sciences Program of the University of Arizona Zuckerman School of Public Health, and with the Global Change PhD minor, among other programs and institutes. He serves on various university committees, including a workgroup through the McGuire Center for Entrepreneurship at the Eller College of Management to create a new Masters program focusing on capitalizing ventures. He also serves on the steering committee developing a new graduate degree certificate program in American Indian natural resource, and as Associate Director for Interdisciplinary Education for the Arizona Telemedicine Program.

Before teaching, Dean Miller served as law clerk to Chief Judge John Godbold of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, as Attorney-Advisor in the Office of Legal Counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice, and as Special Counsel at the Vera Institute of Justice in New York. Dean Miller has been a visiting professor at Stanford Law School and Duke Law School. Dean Miller is a member of the American Law Institute (ALI), and an advisor to various criminal justice and environmental publications and organizations.