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The United States Supreme Court Monday tackles a sensitive legal issue that has taken on both great political and economic relevance this past year.

At a time when budget shortfalls are causing state and local bureaucrats to release prisoners early from over-crowded and expensive jails, the Justices have chosen to decide whether the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against "cruel and unusual punishment" precludes life sentences without parole for juvenile offenders who have not committed capital crimes.

Two Florida cases bring the topic to the High Court. In one, a 17-year-old was sentenced to life without parole after he was convicted for taking part in an armed home invasion while he was on parole for another crime. In the other, a 13-year-old was sentenced to life without parole after he was convicted for raping an elderly woman.

According to the Sentencing Project, an advocacy organization which tracks such things, of the 111 juveniles around the nation currently serving life sentences without parole for non-capital crimes, 77 are in Florida.

Terrance Jamar Graham and Joe Harris Sullivan, the two young men who are challenging the lengths of their sentences, argue simply that the punishment did not fit their crimes given their respective ages. Lawyers for Sullivan, only 13 when he was sentenced, state the core of his case this way: "Life imprisonment without parole sentences for children of 13 are so vanishingly rare as to make their repudiation by contemporary American society unmistakable." They are thus emphasizing the "unusual" in "cruel and unusual" punishment.

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This hot August day really is a dog for the Central Intelligence Agency.

The Justice Department releases a declassified report (drafted in 2004 by the CIA's Inspector General) which contains brutally embarrassing details about past interrogation tactics. The White House announces the formation of a new, elite, highly-complex interrogation team that places the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Council and not the CIA at the core of future questioning sessions of terror suspects. And then the Justice Department comes back with its own internal report recommending the renewal of a criminal probe into past prisoner abuse by CIA agents.

It's been such a tough day in the spy world that CIA Director Leon Panetta had to draft and circulate a "cheer up, buck up" memo to his staff, reminding them in self-serving bureaucratic fashion that what some of them did to those detainees back in 2002 and 2003 was pre-approved by Bush-era lawyers through those Office of Legal Counsel "torture memos."

"For the CIA now," Panetta wrote today, "the challenge is not the battles of yesterday, but those of today and tomorrow. It is there that we must work to enhance the safety of our country. That is the job the American people want us to do…"

This confluence of events over prisoner abuse and the CIA's role in it has been coming for a long, long time. And yet there are still so many moving parts, so many unanswered questions, that perhaps the best course now is simply to identify a few of the most important themes and issues sure to play out over the next few days, weeks and months. Here are the first 10 angles that come to mind.

1. Just because the Justice Department's Office of Personal Responsibility has rejected Bush-era conclusions and recommended a second look at criminal prosecutions doesn't necessarily mean we'll see any current or former CIA agents as defendants anytime soon. The final call still rests with Attorney General Eric Holder and there are as many political reasons not to proceed as there are legal ones warranting trials.

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Editor's Note: On Monday, come back to CourtWatch to watch live video of the Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings, plus live running commentary from CBS News legal analyst Andrew Cohen via Twitter.

Barring an unlikely implosion inside the Hart Office building on Capitol Hill next week, Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is virtually assured of getting enough votes from the Senate Judiciary Committee to guarantee her place on the Court next term. Even her conservative critics are talking now about "conceding" the fight against the nominee.

The only real mysteries going into Monday's confirmation kabuki dance are how well Sotomayor holds her famous temper in check, how windy the Senator's opening statements will be, and how many Republicans will vote for her in the end. The rest will be merely for show, a tradition handed down to us over the past few decades — ever since the Senate and the White House conspired to allow television networks to cover these events live.

But that's not to say that Sotomayor's historic appearance won't or can't generate some insight. She does have some work to do, some questions to answer — not because she needs to sway the already-swayed lawmakers, but because she has an obligation to the White House, her future colleagues on the Court, and the American people to be honest and candid and explanatory. And she must be as tough and thorough in answering questions from her Democratic supporters (who may fault her for being too far to the right) as she is with her Republican opponents (who will fault her for being too far left).

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Nothing, not even an archly conservative Supreme Court, can stop DNA testing from continuing to revolutionize the American criminal justice system. In our lifetime—within the next decade perhaps—pre-trial DNA testing will be as routine a part of trials as fingerprints and orange jumpsuits are now. To deny this, or to try to delay it, isn’t just a fool’s errand it’s entirely counterproductive to the goal of accuracy under the law.

So let’s put Thursday’s DNA ruling into context. Yes, it’s true. A sharply-divided Court refused to recognize a constitutional right to DNA testing following a conviction. “Swing” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy swung this time with his conservative brethren and Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., aiming low as always when it comes to the rights of criminal defendants, declared that:


"DNA testing alone does not always resolve a case…The availability of technologies not available at trial cannot mean that every criminal conviction, or even every criminal conviction involving biological evidence,is suddenly in doubt. The dilemma is how to harness DNA’s power to prove innocence without unnecessarily overthrowing the established system of criminal justice."

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Having established many years ago my bona fides as a critic of the Bush Administration's ham-handed approach to the use of military tribunals against alleged terrorists, I have earned the right to declare now that the American Civil Liberties Union and its allies are wrong, dead wrong, to so quickly and ferociously denounce the Obama Administration's new military commission rules or the government's recommitment to using tribunals for terror suspects.

The administration's suggested changes will not make terror trials perfectly fair to the detainees — no rules of law anywhere for anyone achieve that goal. But from what little we now know about the details of the Obama Administration's revamped policies (tougher hearsay rules, banning the use of evidence obtained through torture, allowing the defendants more leeway in using defense attorneys), the new standards are significantly fairer to terror suspects than were the restrictive rules stubbornly implemented by the last regime.

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Can it be that they are finally going to get it right? The Washington Post this morning reports that the Obama Administration is going to re-start military commissions to process and prosecute many of the remaining terror detainees currently held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Here’s the nut graph from the piece by the Post's Peter Finn: "The rules would block the use of evidence obtained from coercive interrogations, tighten the admissibility of hearsay testimony and allow detainees greater freedom to choose their attorneys, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly."

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It is nice, bordering on quaint, to think that President Barack Obama would be able to successfully select a "regular person" (i.e. a non-lawyer) to replace Justice David H. Souter on the United States Supreme Court. It's certainly laudable that he would want to change the experiential makeup of the Court—all nine current Justices, including the soon-to-be-retired Justice Souter, came from federal appeals courts, which are almost as isolated from the rest of the world as is the Supreme Court itself.

But neither Oprah nor Dr. Phil nor Donald Trump nor that Scottish lady who sings nor Tiger Woods nor Bruce Springsteen nor any other non-lawyer will make it to the Court.

Here's why: the law in 2009 is far too complex for a lay person to jump into at the highest possible level. There are too many rules, too many standards, too much precedent, and too many exceptions. It would be like asking your high school French teacher to suddenly in a month be able to consistently comprehend, translate, and implement instructions in ancient Latin.

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Hello and welcome to the third (or maybe the fourth) incarnation of CourtWatch, an online column at cbsnews.com that began in the good old days, a decade ago, right after Al Gore invented the Internet, when Arlen Specter was a Republican, Al Franken was a comedian, and Susan Boyle was just a nice Scottish lady.

Today, CourtWatch moves from being a regular feature in the Opinion section of the website to being a stand-alone blog that will be updated daily (the Good Lord willing) with analysis and commentary on breaking legal news and events. We’ll try to find you good links to the best law pieces around—we’ll trawl through the papers and blogs to do so-- and hopefully we’ll generate interesting conversations and debates about topics you care about. And if there is something you’d like to see covered by CourtWatch by all means let us know.

-Andrew Cohen

More From Andrew Cohen:

CourtWatch Columns Before Today

Andrew Cohen's Posts In Hotsheet