framing, and it does not do so today. Rogers should have anticipated that the year-and-a-day rule might no longer exist under modern circumstances. Thirteenth century medical science was not capable of determining the cause of death beyond a reasonable doubt after a significant amount of time had elapsed following the ultimately fatal blow. For this reason, the year-and-a-day rule served as a kind of limitation period on murder prosecutions. However, as medical science has advanced, forensic scientists have been able to determine the cause of a person's death later and later after the fatal event occurs. "For this reason, the year and a day rule has been legislatively or judicially abolished in the vast majority of jurisdictions recently to have addressed the issue," as the Tennessee Supreme Court observed. This pervasive change in the law should have put Rogers on notice that, although the rule had not been formally abolished in Tennessee, it was clearly moribund in 1994 in American law generally and Tennessee law specifically. Accordingly, it was hardly unexpected and indefensible for the Tennessee Supreme Court, while considering an appeal from Rogers's own conviction, to first formally abolish the rule and then to apply that decision retroactively to his own case. Dissenting opinion Applying his originalist understanding of the Ex Post Facto Clause, Justice Scalia concluded that the Tennessee Supreme Court's retroactive application of its decision to remove the year-and-a-day rule from its jurisprudence rendered Rogers's conviction for murder invalid. Scalia began with a different premise than the majority—that the Tennessee Supreme Court had changed that state's law of murder when it abolished the year-and-a-day rule in Rogers's case. If the legislature had abolished the rule, the Ex Post Facto Clause would not allow that abolishment to apply to Rogers's case. Why should the fact that it was the state supreme court that abolished the rule make a difference? The process of lawmaking by common-law courts—applying legal principles to novel fact situations—is not interrupted by forbidding them from applying new legal principles to new factual situations, after all. Scalia thus believed that there was no reason not to apply the Ex Post Facto Clause to "unelected judges" just as it applied to the "elected representatives of all the people." What occurred in the present case, then, is precisely what Blackstone said—and the Framers believed—would not suffice [as a rationale of decision by a common-law court]. The Tennessee Supreme