Digital Commons Network^™

Reimagining International Investment Law For The Age Of Minerals, Taylor Nchako

Washington and Lee Law Review

New technologies––from artificial intelligence (AI) and electric vehicles to medical devices and consumer electronics––demand an ever-increasing amount of minerals like lithium, cobalt, and copper. The United States requires these aptly named “critical” minerals to develop AI infrastructure, advance the clean energy transition, and remain economically competitive. As technology continues to advance at an astonishing pace, the U.S. has grown increasingly interested in securing critical minerals from sources in Africa. To obtain critical minerals, the U.S. must utilize investment treaties in its business dealings with African countries. At the same time, international investment law has garnered increased attention due to a …

Fur, Feathers, And Frameworks: The Federal Legal Landscape Of Animal Welfare In The United States And Switzerland, Michael Melch

Washington and Lee Law Review

The United States relies on a predominantly utilitarian, welfarist framework that regulates certain uses of animals while preserving their status as property. Switzerland embeds the concept of animal dignity in its constitutional and statutory law, formally recognizing animals as beings with intrinsic worth. This foundational divergence produces significant doctrinal and practical differences, including the breadth of species covered, the structure of legal obligations, and the normative goals of regulation.

This Note provides a comparative analysis of animal welfare laws in the United States and Switzerland, exploring their philosophical, legal, and practical dimensions. It examines the U.S.’s utilitarian approach, exemplified by …

Litigating The Youth Mental Health Crisis: Mechanisms To Regulate Addictive Social Media Design, Talia Elliott

Washington and Lee Law Review

While social media offers real benefits to users, such as providing access to information and facilitating the free exchange of ideas, excessive social media use is associated with increases in anxiety, depression, and other serious mental-health harms. Social media platforms are designed to maximize profit by capturing user attention, resulting in interfaces that are dangerously addictive and prone to exposing users to harmful content. Currently, social media users alone bear the burden of navigating the dangers of social media. This is untenable. Young users, whose less developed brains leave them more vulnerable to addictive design features, find self-regulation especially challenging. …

Taking The Thumb Off The Scale: Rebalancing Parental And Children’S Rights To Empower Child Protective Services, Sebastian Wagner

Utah Law Review

This Note provides background on the current legal framework of state prevention of child maltreatment in the United States. It discusses parental rights and the Parental Rights Doctrine, child rights in the United States, and how states prevent child maltreatment through child protective service agencies.

This Note also explores the legal landscape surrounding the balance of parental rights and children’s rights in child welfare cases. One of the central issues in the current framework is how the Parental Rights Doctrine can significantly limit the state’s ability to intervene in cases where children are at risk. State intervention, governed by vague …

The Law Of Health Equity, Govind Persad

Utah Law Review

Since 2025, health equity has faced increasing hostility from federal courts, agencies, and the executive branch. Yet health equity’s promise— to narrow stark health gaps along racial, economic, and other lines— remains urgent and widely endorsed by states, localities, and nongovernmental actors. Evaluating how health equity efforts might falter under or surmount these challenges requires understanding their legal underpinnings: the law of health equity.

This Article is the first in legal scholarship to comprehensively examine federal, state, and private sector health equity commitments. It reveals sustained societal recognition of health equity’s importance, while highlighting the need for more precise and …

Deporting Disability, Tania N. Valdez

Utah Law Review

Since the enactment of the earliest migration laws in the United States, people with disabilities have been targeted for exclusion and expulsion based on stereotypes that they are either dangerous or not productive. Although some of the pejorative language regarding disability in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) has changed over time, certain statutory provisions and the very structure of the INA still allow ableism to operate broadly in immigration adjudications. This Article focuses on the subtle, but pervasive, ways that immigration law disfavors noncitizens with disabilities. In particular, this Article examines ableism in the context of removal (commonly known …

Analyzing The Benefits Of Artificial Intelligence To Racially Inclusive Democracy, Spencer Overton

Utah Law Review

Over the past two decades—as the United States has grown more ethnically diverse—the U.S. Supreme Court has dismantled key voting rights protections, and state legislatures have erected a record number of voting restrictions. Largely oblivious to this growing gap in legal protections, several artificial intelligence (“AI”) optimists have claimed that AI can help usher in a more inclusive, participatory, and unbiased democracy. Such an outcome, however, is far from guaranteed. This Article is the first to comprehensively examine the extent to which AI—and the legal frameworks that regulate it—can advance racially inclusive democracy. It responds to the AI optimism literature …

Abortion (Re)Federalization, Gerald S. Dickinson

Utah Law Review

 This Article examines how the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision has opened an unconventional pathway for the development of a new form of “bottom-up constitutionalism” that could reshape federal abortion rights in the future. Traditionally, federal constitutional law has exerted a dominant influence over state laws and state court jurisprudence. The uniformity in abortion protections nationwide for decades was a product of the Roe v. Wade era of federal supremacy. However, Dobbs reversed this dynamic by dramatically curtailing federal constitutional authority over abortion, thereby leaving states as primary rights regulators. This Article focuses on the …

Puhca 2.0, Joshua C. Macey

Utah Law Review

Many electric utilities today are vertically integrated and own both rate regulated (transmission and distribution) and competitive (generation) affiliates. This structure gives them incentives to make investments that favor their affiliated generators and shift risk onto captive ratepayers. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and state public utility commissions have adopted a variety of rules to address these concerns, including limits on affiliate transactions and functional unbundling requirements. Unfortunately, these requirements have failed to prevent utilities from using their control over grid infrastructure to benefit affiliates that participate in competitive markets.

This Article therefore calls for a structural solution: a …

Learning From Lochner: When Children Are Harmed By Technological Revolutions, Brooke Hodson Davies

Utah Law Review

Drawing on parallels from child labor reform in the Second Industrial Revolution, this Note argues that stopping Big Tech’s harm to children in the Fourth Industrial Revolution requires Congressional legislation and judicial avoidance of Lochnerian approaches to the Constitution. Like its Big Business predecessors, today Big Tech maximizes profits by harming kids, necessitating government intervention of this market failure. Despite noble attempts, state-based efforts have been rendered relatively ineffective due to legislative non-uniformity, interstate competition, and enforcement limitations. Likewise, federal regulations currently in place fall short and even shield Big Tech from liability. Consequently, Congressional action is urgently needed. Critically, …

Agri‑Photovoltaics In Poland’S Energy Transition – Untapped Potential?, Marcin Gronowski

Studia i Materiały Wydział Zarządzania Uniwersytet Warszawski

Objective: The aim of this study is to identify and assess the legal barriers hindering the implementation of agrovoltaics as a technology that enables the dual use of agricultural land for electricity generation whilst maintaining agricultural production, and thereby to identify the legislative changes required to unlock its transformative potential. The objective set takes into account the feasibility of implementing energy policy in the area of photovoltaic development, whilst balancing the need to protect agricultural land and the principle of sustainable development.

Methodology: The analysis was conducted using dogmatic and legal‑theoretical methods for the interpretation of legal norms, as well …

Illusory Copyright And The Private Censorship Of Art History, Peter J. Karol

Suffolk University Law School Faculty Works

This article makes a simple but in its own way startling claim: much 20th century U.S. visual art is not protected by copyright. These works were regularly “published” when they were first exhibited for sale in commercial galleries, often marketed through contemporaneous illustrated catalogs, almost always without copyright notice of any kind. They were thereby placed in the public domain. What is remarkable is the extent to which this reality has been ignored by artist estates and foundations and other art industry players. They operate on the incorrect, self-serving and generally unexamined assumption that most 20th century American art is …

The Contested Contingent Constitution: Plutocrats, Right-Wing Populists, And Labor Rights In The U.S., Kate Andrias

Faculty Scholarship

Constitutional labor rights have long been negligible in the United States. Now, with the ascendance of Donald Trump’s right-wing authoritarianism, even statutory labor rights are under threat. Yet there is an apparent paradox: While the Trump Administration seeks to declare the NLRB unconstitutional and has decimated federal workers’ rights, Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) movement rose to power in part by invoking the plight of the American worker. The more populist wing of the American Right does not expressly challenge the constitutionality of labor law. Indeed, some right-wing populists urge an expansion of labor rights, emphasizing such goals as …

Pragmatic Conceptualism, Public Nuisance, And The American Opioid Litigation, Benjamin C. Zipursky

Washington and Lee Law Review

Public nuisance as a part of American tort law has been as high profile in the first decades of this century as products liability law was in the last several decades of the twentieth century. The American opioid litigation over the past decades is a spectacular example, filling headlines and generating billions of dollars of settlements. There is a plausible argument, however, that the doctrinal core of the opioid litigation is meritless because there simply is no “interference with public right” as required by public nuisance law. The first aim of this Article is to articulate and assess that argument. …

Equality Before Tax Law, Charles Delmotte

Washington and Lee Law Review

The income tax code is riddled with exceptions—exclusions, rate preferences, and deductions—that reduce tax burdens for dominant majorities and powerful interest groups. These carveouts now amount to an astonishing $1.9 trillion, equivalent to 75 percent of all federal income tax revenue. By granting policymakers discretion to allocate tax exceptions, the tax system not only invites capture but also the weaponization of taxation against disfavored economic and political groups. Yet despite the central role of these exceptions, tax scholars have not articulated a principle requiring taxation according to general rules.

This Article bridges philosophy with insights from political economy to reveal …

Universal Injunctions And The Executive-Judicial Relationship In America, Jeremy Kang

Senior Honors Theses

This thesis examines a specific type of legal controversy surrounding the Trump administration’s dealings with the judicial branch. Central to the matter is the concept of universal injunctions: how a federal court can enjoin even non-parties to a case from behaving in certain ways.

The history of universal injunctions, from pre-Enlightenment England to modern America, is initially discussed. Then special attention is given to their use against President Donald Trump in particular, culminating in the Supreme Court curtailing them, and district court judges ignoring the high court’s ruling. Finally, previous examples of conflict between the American executive and judicial branches …

Mapping Minority Investigative Powers In Congress, David Rapallo

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

“Shut down the Senate . . .” “Roll over and play dead . . .” In the first hundred days of President Donald Trump’s second term, these were the rallying cries of two far ends of a debate among Democrats about how to respond to the administration’s unprecedented actions. This debate, which rages on today, has been marked by a lack of specificity about the various oversight tools available to members of the minority party in Congress, particularly when they investigate whether the Executive Branch is faithfully executing the laws Congress passes. Scholarship too has focused little on the full …

Editorial Foreword Ijsls Volume 5 Number 2, Sulistyowati Irianto

The Indonesian Journal of Socio-Legal Studies

No abstract provided.

Demographic Trends And Far-Right Party Support In Europe: The Role Of The Cordon Sanitaire, Maxwell Curry

Department of Political Science: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This study examines whether cordons sanitaires, institutional exclusionary arrangements common in Western and Central Europe on the part of mainstream political actors aimed to prevent far-right political parties perceived as posing a threat to liberal democratic order from entering into governing coalitions or otherwise participating in mainstream political life, condition the relationship between immigration-related demographic change and support for far-right political parties. Contemporary scholarship has extensively examined the relationship between immigration and support for far-right political parties, but comparatively little research has examined the institutional factors that potentially condition such a relationship. In an analysis of parliamentary election data …

State Policy And Regulatory Approaches To Sustainable Aviation Fuel Across The United States, Somtochukwu Attamah, Mary Johnson, Lara Fowler, Michael D. Helbing

Faculty Scholarship

Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) represents a critical lever for achieving near-term decarbonization of the aviation industry. SAF can be manufactured for “drop-in” use in existing aircraft and fueling systems, allowing manufacturers to achieve lifecycle greenhouse gas (GHG) savings relative to standard jet fuel. However, U.S. policy is still disjointed: federal incentives are accompanied by diffuse state efforts, which means uneven market-based feedback and investment risk. After outlining the federal policy context, this Article conducts a comparative analysis of SAF-related policy frameworks across the fifty states. This includes a variety of government solutions offered in the form of enacted and proposed …

Can The Epa Withdraw The Endangerment Finding?, Jonathan Adler

Faculty Publications

The Trump administration has made repeal of the Environmental Protection Agency’s “endangerment finding” on greenhouse gases the centerpiece of its environmental deregulation agenda. “We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the US, and more,” proclaimed EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin when announcing the agency’s plan to reconsider the finding in March 2025. Since then, the agency has followed through, pushing endangerment finding repeal ahead of other, more traditional, deregulatory efforts. While politically popular with parts of President …

An Abundant Lack Of Introspection, Jonathan Adler

Faculty Publications

In this review Jonathan Adler critiques Abundance authors Klein and Thompson's analysis of how regulation is holding back progress in decarbonization, America's housing supply crisis, and innovation. While agreeing with the authors' assessment that regulation policy is hampering efforts in these areas, Adler objects to the book's proposals for improving regulatory bottlenecks, arguing the authors of Abundance refuse to acknowledge the role of market institutions in creating abundant supply or to admit the fault in their assumption that the failures of centralized government decision making can be repaired while maintaining centralized government decision making.

This abstract has been constructed from …

#Metoo Vs. Anti-Dei, Nicole Porter

Faculty Publications

Nine years ago, the entire country was talking about the #MeToo movement, which can be credited with the unseating of hundreds of powerful men and changing the way we talk about and address sexual harassment in the workplace. In 2026, continued progress of the #MeToo movement might be threatened by a new movement-the Trump Administration's attack on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. This article discusses the ways in which the #MeToo movement conflicts with the anti-DEI movement. Specifically, it addresses how employers will respond to pressure to dismantle DEI programs, offices, and training, and how those responses will affect …

Owning The Al Revolution, George S. Georgiev

Articles

No abstract provided.

July 2026 Dentistry And The Law — Can Unlicensed People Own A Dental Practice? Who Is Enforcing The Law?, Daniel Schulte Jd

The Journal of the Michigan Dental Association

This legal column addresses the complexities of dental practice ownership in Michigan, clarifying that only licensed dentists can legally own a practice through professional corporations or professional limited liability companies. It explains the "Corporate Practice of Medicine Doctrine," which aims to ensure licensed professionals, rather than profit-motivated lay persons, control health service delivery. The article details how management companies often operate legally as landlords or service providers without technically owning the practice itself. Finally, it notes that only the Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs and the attorney general have the authority to enforce these regulations.

Classical Liberalism And Property, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Classical liberalism is characterized by several key attributes. Its central normative criterion is the well‑being of the individual, not some aggregate like society or the nation‑state. Individuals are presumptively regarded as responsible actors, capable of judging their own best interests and accountable for their actions that interfere with the well‑being of others. Because individuals are presumptively regarded as responsible actors, there is a strong preference for imposing only minimal obligations on them through the power of the state, and these usually involve general negative duties that are universal in character, chiefly to forbear from using force or fraud to interfere …

Presidential Immunity: Before And After Trump, Thomas P. Schmidt

Faculty Scholarship

“All the officers of government,” the Supreme Court said long ago, “from the highest to the lowest, are creatures of the law, and are bound to obey it.” Despite that ringing and categorical language, however, the Court has held that the President — the “highest” and most powerful of all government officers — is “immune” from judicial oversight in several respects. Indeed, when the Court held last Term that former presidents are presumptively immune from criminal prosecution for officials acts, the dissenters warned: “In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”

This Article …

There Is No Free Benchmark: An Institutional View Of Legal Ai Benchmarking, Neel Guha, Andy K. Zhang, Christine Tsang, Christopher D. Manning, Julian Nyarko, Daniel E. Ho

Faculty Scholarship

Despite substantial excitement around the use of AI in law, little information exists on the performance and associated risks of the domain’s widely marketed tools. Recent work, for instance, has demonstrated the significant potential for “hallucinations” — wherein models make up facts, law, and precedent — leading Chief Justice Roberts to spotlight this risk in his annual report on the judiciary. We argue that there is a need for public AI benchmarking in law. First, relative to other AI application domains, the legal AI ecosystem lacks legibility — there is little information about the design and performance of many commercial …

Free Expression And Civil Rights On Campus: Consistency And The Kant-Rawls Heuristic, David M. Schizer

Faculty Scholarship

Universities learned hard lessons in the months after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7. 2023. This painful and challenging time highlighted the urgent need to pursue two critical goals, which sometimes are in tension with each other. First, universities have to protect academic freedom and free expression. This is their life blood. Second, universities also have to honor their legal and moral obligation to combat discrimination, including antisemitism.

Yet this is easier said than done. Protecting free expression means allowing speech that is controversial and even offensive. But this speech can contribute to a hostile environment. So, in seeking both …

Bodies In The Beds: How Reits, Private Equity Firms, And County Hospitals Monetize Nursing Home Residents As Real Estate Acquisitions, Daniel L. Hatcher

All Faculty Scholarship

Nursing home residents have become monetized targets of real estate acquisitions. Established in 1960, Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) were envisioned as allowing individuals to invest in commercial real estate without owning properties. That seemingly innocuous investment idea has led to the growth of a behind-the-scenes empire of little-understood conglomerates of REITs buying up nursing homes and other healthcare facilities across the country. Capitalizing on tax-exempt income incentives, exploiting “triple-net” leasebacks, funneling profits through subsidiaries, and shielding ownership and assets from the liability of operations, the corporatized owners extract cash from facilities and leave harm in their wake. And to …