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Bad Parenting On Trial: How Gender, Race, And Class Shape Parental Responsibility Prosecutions And Laws For School Shootings, Makayla R. Foust

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

In 2021, James and Jennifer Crumbley became the first parents in the United States to be found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in connection with their son’s school shooting that killed four people and injured multiple others. As school shootings continue to devastate communities across the country, prosecutors are increasingly holding parents criminally liable for their children’s actions. This development raises fundamental questions about justice, accountability, and the limits of criminal liability. While these laws aim to curb gun violence by enforcing parental accountability, they will disproportionately affect marginalized communities, particularly along gender, racial, and socioeconomic lines. As legal precedent expands, …

Table Of Contents

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Dignity By Design: A Human-Centered Framework For Ethical Ai, Armin Tadayon

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

The launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 has triggered a global arms race–both among private technology companies and between nation states–for dominance in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). If this nascent technology, which is permeating every aspect of our lives as more companies across multiple sectors deploy it for a variety of functions, malfunctions or behaves in unanticipated ways, it can severely affect individuals in their day-to-day lives with broader consequences for society at large. As such, as AI permeates every aspect of our lives, and in some instances, begins to replace humans and human decision-making, it is imperative …

Chevron Deference, Prospective Gay Parents, And The Need For A Centralized Child Welfare System, Mantas Grigorovicius

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

For over four decades, Chevron deference allowed federal agencies to exercise considerable discretion in interpreting laws, enabling them to implement broad regulatory agendas. This deference was pivotal for administrative agencies, such as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), in shaping public policy. However, in 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court decided to overturn this precedent, shifting power from agencies to courts and potentially reshaping the regulatory landscape. This Article examines the implications of this change within the context of child welfare, focusing on HHS’s role in foster care. As states often rely on taxpayer-funded private child-placing agencies to …

Imprisoned Without A Verdict: The Constitutional Crisis Of Pre-Trial Solitary Confinement, Symone R. Gibbs

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

Kalief Browder’s name endures as a chilling reminder of the human cost of pre-trial solitary confinement. His story reveals the constitutional paradox and moral failure at the heart of this practice: Individuals who remain legally innocent are subjected to one of the harshest punishments the state can impose. This practice strips people of their liberty twice over, first through incarceration itself, and again through prolonged isolation that inflicts devastating psychological harm. Despite its severity, the use of solitary confinement against pre-trial detainees remains largely overlooked in legal scholarship and reform, even as it undermines the presumption of innocence, exacerbates systemic …

The Broken Promise Of The Idea: How Delays And Disparities Undermine Special Education Rights, Silvia C. Montiel Morales

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) was enacted to guarantee children with disabilities the right to a free appropriate public education. In practice, that promise is too often broken. Students, especially those from low-income families and communities of color, wait months or years for evaluations, attend underfunded schools that lack qualified staff, and face systemic barriers to enforcing their rights. Meanwhile, families with resources can sidestep delays through private testing, attorneys, and advocacy, leaving others behind. This Note examines how systemic delays, underfunding, and inequities in special education services undermine children’s rights under the statute. It argues that these …

Editor's Note

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Toys As Evidence, Randall K. Johnson

Faculty Works

This Essay asks and answers a single question, which was posed during a recent symposium at the National Museum of Toys & Miniatures. Could the study of revealed preferences, which is the idea that observed behaviors are the best indicator of one’s beliefs, improve our collective understanding about what constitutes unlawful discrimination in certain U.S. markets? A possible answer, which is informed by the Brown v. Board of Education decision, is the study of revealed preferences may improve our collective understanding for three reasons.

One reason is the study of revealed preferences provides a window into how some producers and …

The Social Promise Of Hybrid Entities, Frederick M. Spight Jr.

American University Business Law Review

Many Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are struggling to stay afloat. These historic, and historically underfunded, institutions suffer from a chronic shortage of resources, leading to the notable closures of schools, like Concordia College. Some critics question the modern place of the HBCU as a relic of a bygone era. This article argues, however, that HBCUs are worth sustaining and provides the legal tool to do so: the hybrid entity. 

Hybrid entities arose from the social enterprise movement, which sought to harness the power of both nonprofit and for-profit organizations. Operating under the philosophy of “doing well, while doing …

Making Room For Cultural Humility In An Anti-Dei Space, Shelley Ward Bennett

Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality

This Article analyzes the intersection of state anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) laws and the American Bar Association (ABA) Standard 303(c)’s cross-cultural competency education mandate and offers suggestions for how these policies can coexist. The surge in anti-DEI laws issued in twenty states over the last four years has created challenges and uncertainty for public law schools and their professors seeking to include cultural competency instruction in their curriculum. Though some have expressed concerns that the requirements of state anti-DEI laws and Standard 303(c) may conflict, this Article proposes that such a conflict should not be presumed because Standard 303(c) …

Immortal Justice: Why The Henrietta Lacks Family Merits Restitution Today, Suzette Malveaux

Scholarly Articles

Almost three quarters of a century have passed since Henrietta Lacks had her cells biopsied from her cervix without her knowledge or consent. Upon discovering that Henrietta’s cells were immortal, scientists have been able to solve the most vexing medical problems of modern times and save countless lives worldwide. Aware of the cells’ scandalous origins, big pharma has nonetheless commercialized and wildly profited from the HeLa cell line without sharing the benefit with Henrietta’s family, who has been left traumatized and destitute by the initial theft.

Despite the passage of time, Henrietta’s family is seeking restitution today from pharmaceutical companies …

Rethinking The Fund Termination Sanction, Samuel R. Bagenstos

Articles

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is often referred to as the “sleeping giant” of civil rights law. It is a “giant” because it prohibits any form of race discrimination engaged in by any recipient of federal financial assistance, and because the remedy set forth in the statute for a violation is the termination of federal funds. And it is “sleeping” because, except for a brief moment during the desegregation era, the federal government had never seriously attempted to terminate a recipient’s federal grants for a violation of the statute. Nor had the federal government seriously attempted …

Incarceration As Sexualized Violence, Leigh S. Goodmark

Faculty Scholarship

Sexual violence—rape, sexual assault, strip and body cavity searches, surveillance, and reproductive abuse—is a regular occurrence in women’s prisons. Some of that violence is clearly illegal; some occupies a legally gray middle ground; and some is considered essential to the operation of the prison system. All of it, however, could violate the law if the victims were not incarcerated. Sexual violence is so pervasive within women’s prisons that incarceration can only be understood as a form of sexualized violence. Given the certainty that people incarcerated in women’s prisons will experience some form of sexual abuse, continued incarceration can only be …

Founding Mothers: The Nineteenth Amendment’S Place In Originalist Due Process Analysis, Tracy Turner

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

[INTRODUCTION] During a public speech in 1856, Sojourner Truth is described as stating: “I have had two husbands yet I never possessed one of my own. I have had five children and never could take any one of them up and say “my child” or “my children . . .” One of Truth’s two husbands was an older enslaved man, forced upon her for the purpose of providing new victims of slavery. The second husband may have been a man she considered to be her real husband but was never allowed to marry. By law, Truth’s children belonged entirely to …

Civil Rights In Theory, Health Disparities In Practice: Affordable Care Act Section 1557 And The Maternal Mortality Crisis, Grace Hall

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

[INTRODUCTION] On a hot Fourth of July in 2021, Harmony Ball-Stribling spent her final day laughing with her husband, hours before preeclampsia killed her. Harmony was eight months pregnant and living in Belzoni, Mississippi, where she celebrated the holiday with her church congregation. Her congregation prayed over her and her baby for a safe delivery, as she was scheduled to have a cesarean section in five days.

Later that evening, Harmony woke in agony, vomited, and complained of chest pain to her husband, Mr. Stribling. Harmony’s husband put his wifein their car and began the more than thirty-mile drive to …

The Ambiguity That Isn’T: Why Same-Sex Marriage Is Legal In American Samoa, Dante Cade Harootunian, Sammi Lawrence

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that prohibitions on same-sex marriage violate the equal protection guarantees of the U.S. Constitution, several government officials in American Samoa issued statements claiming that the decision had no effect in American Samoa, and, to date, no same-sex couples have

applied for a marriage license in the territory. This Article analyzes the Obergefell decision in light of other federal and territorial court decisions that determined the applicability of constitutional rights to U.S. territories and concludes that, despite the statements of local officials, the Obergefell decision applies in American Samoa, and the …

Foreword, Patricia B. Barnett

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

No abstract provided.

A New Playbook: The Procedural Resilience Of Oregon’S Rooney Rule In The Wake Of Students For Fair Admissions V. Harvard, Jada I. Cook

CMC Senior Theses

This article evaluates the constitutionality of Oregon’s codified Rooney Rule considering the Supreme Court’s decision to end affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard. Passed in 2009, the Oregon mandate requires public universities to include at least one minority applicant in the interview process for all head coaching vacancies. By analyzing the architectural origins of the Rooney Rule within the National Football League (NFL) and the systemic racial exclusion it sought to dismantle, this research explores whether interview-stage mandates, that are applied at the state level, can survive the rigorous application of the strict scrutiny standard. …

The Freedman's Savings Bank And Financial Literacy Education, Alexis Ann Ballance

Law Student Publications

In the United States, white, non-Hispanic individuals possess approximately seven times the wealth of Black individuals. One recent study found that for every 100 dollars in wealth held by a white household, a Black household holds about fifteen dollars. This disparity in wealth accumulation is referred to as the wealth gap, and it has historically stratified along racial lines. Although income inequality contributes to this disparity, the racial wealth gap is much more pronounced and continues to grow. ...

Police Use Of Force: Barnes V. Felix And Moving Beyond The Moment Of Threat, Rebecca Aitchison

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Things Humans Do: The Use Of Esds On Autistic Children, Jami L. Anderson

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

On March 26, 2024, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) published a proposed rule (PR) that would ban the use of electrical stimulation devices (ESDs)—shock devices—for treatment of selfinjurious behavior (SIB) and aggressive behavior (AB). This PR was directed at Judge Rotenberg Education Center (JRC), a residential institution in Canton, Massachusetts, that treats children and young adults with profound intellectual and emotional impairments, most of whom are autistic. Medical evidence has well established that ESDs not only fail to treat SIB, but cause the rate and severity of SIB to worsen. This is the FDA’s second attempt to ban ESDs. …

Balancing The Scales Between The Evolution Of Affirmative Action Policies And The Equal Protection Clause, Jesicca Patel

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

This article argues that the Supreme Court’s ruling ending affirmative action was correct. Affirmative action does not solve the underlying issues of racial inequality and systemic oppression. Instead, affirmative action undermines the success of minorities and inflames racial tensions. This article is divided into Five Parts. The first part examines U.S. Supreme Court precedent addressing the Court’s decisions in upholding affirmative action policies in educational settings before Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. The second part discusses Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and why the Supreme Court …

People V. Riche, Timothy Mccormick

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Black Suburbanization: Potent Hope Or Illusory Promise?, Mary Jo Wiggins

Marquette Law Review

Suburbs are popular. People like living in them, and scholars like studying them. For the first time, more Americans live in the suburbs than in central cities. Perhaps more noteworthy is that more Black Americans live in the suburbs than ever before. Given these realities, it is not surprising that the suburbs have become a laboratory for analyzing a host of political, legal, and economic questions.

In previous scholarship, I examined the complex phenomenon of Black suburbanization through the lens of two communities: South DeKalb, Georgia and Prince George’s County, Maryland. These communities were part of what I called the …

Access Denied: The Injustice Of Plra Exhaustion, Rachel Kincaid

Marquette Law Review

Law students learn to “think like a lawyer” by studying appellate decisions that contain extensive reasoning and result from vigorous advocacy by lawyers on both sides. These well-reasoned decisions allow students to learn how to distill legal rules from judicial opinions: to focus on the rationale behind a court’s decision so that they might be able to predict how the court would deal with a different factual scenario. But this focus on extensively reasoned and argued appellate court opinions obscures the access-to-justice crisis plaguing our legal systems; most people cannot even afford to pay a lawyer to represent them, let …

Daniel Ezra Subotnik (1942-2024) Obituary

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Son Of Orwell, Chesterton, And Mill, Stephen B. Presser

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Data Rights For Workers, Pauline Kim, Rachel Leavitt

Scholarship@WashULaw

Workers are subject to immense amounts of data collection on the job, and the algorithmic management tools built with that data can produce negative effects, including deskilling jobs, unstable work hours, reduced wages, and dangerous and degrading working conditions. Workers thus have significant interests how their data are collected and used, and yet they have been excluded from nearly all the recently enacted or proposed data protection laws. Their exclusion stems from data protection’s roots in privacy law and theory, which primarily focused on consumers as data subjects. Current data protection laws, even if expanded to cover workers, would provide …

Abolishing The Family, Susan Frelich Appleton, Albertina Antognini

Scholarship@WashULaw

Family law scholarship is replete with calls for reform. Yet gender-, race-, and class-based inequalities within and across families remain intractable. So what if, instead of reforming the family, we abolish it?

Abolishing the family might sound like a startling idea for a family-law analysis, especially after decades of efforts to expand the legal understanding of “family.” But the proposal is hardly new. In this Article, we lay the groundwork for integrating family abolitionist ideas, which have until now mostly taken place outside of law, into family law scholarship.

While family abolition is in many ways a radical departure from …

Who Makes The Jury? Demographics And Decision-Making In The Jury Process., Ana B. Pons

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Within the American judicial system, juries have played a central role in promoting representation and fairness in the courtroom. However, limited information exists on whether prosecutorial decisions during jury selection, jury composition, or jury behavior differ based on the sex, race/ethnicity, type of case, political ideology, or geographic location of potential jurors. Following PRISMA guidelines, this scoping review synthesizes 48 peer-reviewed articles published between the 1940s and 2026 to examine whether prosecutorial decision-making and jury outcomes vary based on the sex, race/ethnicity, type of case, political ideology, or geographic location of potential jurors. Findings indicated that men are disproportionately selected …