Of "Practical" Scholarship and Amici

Recent prawfs posts have discussed whether scholarship should be "practical" and the benefits of doing amicus work.  Yesterday's SCOTUS opinion in J.D.B. v. North Carolina, authored by Justice Sotomayor, provided a nice illustration of the value of both.  In deciding that a minor's age informs the Miranda custody analysis, the Court cited work about false confessions, often involving juveniles, that have been revealed by the DNA exonerations.  (Think of the Central Park jogger case).  Specifically, Justice Sotomayor cited an article by Steven Drizin & Richard Leo in the North Carolina Law Review, "The Problem of False Confessions in the Post-DNA World," as well as the Amicus Brief of the Center for Wrongful Convictions of Youth, on which Prof. Drizin is listed as counsel (which itself cites numerous articles by law profs in a wide range of law reviews).  Other law profs, including Brandon Garrett, author of Convicting the Innocent, have painstakingly reviewed the DNA cases and catalogued the issues in them, documenting the problems of lying informants, unreliable eyewitness identifications, faulty forensic evidence, and false confessions.  IMHO, the efforts of Professors Drizin and Leo represent high quality sholarship with real-world applicability.  Apparently, the J.D.B. majority agrees.