As part of its notice regarding proposed priorities and amendments, the U.S. Sentencing Commission has announced what may become its broadest examination of the federal sentencing system in years. Rather than identifying only a handful of discrete Guidelines provisions for amendment, the Commission’s first priority for the 2026–27 amendment cycle is an evaluation of the Guidelines and federal sentencing practices as a whole, timed to coincide with two milestones: forty years since the original Guidelines Manual and roughly twenty years of experience with the advisory Guidelines regime created by United States v. Booker. The Commission seeks to determine whether the now-advisory Guidelines ranges continue to reflect the statutory purposes of sentencing, how advisory Guidelines influence actual sentencing practices, which provisions meaningfully distinguish culpability, and whether forty years of empirical experience support existing sentencing rules.

The Department of Justice has announced that it will no longer seek criminal penalties against federally licensed firearm dealers for selling handguns to otherwise law-abiding adults between the ages of 18 and 20. DOJ cited an opinion by its Office of Legal Counsel concluding that the prohibitions under 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) are unconstitutional under Bruen. (Link to opinion in post).

Since the Supreme Court’s Fourth Amendment ruling in Chatrie v. United States, at least two federal courts have applied its reasoning to two different kinds of cell phone technology used by law enforcement. A district court in Mississippi held that a warrant for a “tower dump,” which collects information from every phone connecting to particular cell towers, was an unconstitutional “general warrant.” More recently, the Fourth Circuit held that the use of cell-site simulators, which obtain a cell phone’s location by impersonating a cell tower, constitutes a Fourth Amendment search.