Digital Commons Network^™

Period-Proofing Your Data, Sofia Makepeace

Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts

Menstrual cycle tracking apps and their accompanying wearables, collectively known as FemTech, promise women health insights in a healthcare system that often fails to treat problems that primarily affect women. FemTech lets users map their cycles, recognize symptoms, experience non-hormonal birth control, and contribute to long-overdue research on conditions like endometriosis, PCOS, and perimenopause. But after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the same datasets that empower users have also become valuable in criminalizing abortion-related crimes. Because most FemTech privacy policies fall outside HIPAA, intimate logs of bleeding, sex, mood, and biometric signals can now be criminal evidence in …

Hearing: Programs For Justice-Involved Veterans, Rose Carmen Goldberg

Presentations

Statement for the Record of Professor Rose Carmen Goldberg is attached. A recording of the hearing is available at https://www.veterans.senate.gov/2026/4/programs-for-justice-involved-veterans.

Generated Wills And Responsible Ai Use In Estate Law, Collin Peters

Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts

Generative AI tools have been increasingly used by corporations and individuals to create documents quickly and cheaply based on short human inputs. The coming of widely accessible and cheap-to-use generative AI tools introduces the possibility of firms or lay testators using AI to generate wills. However, the risks of using AI to generate wills are largely unexplored and have not received much regulatory attention nor discussion in the literature. As a result, the question of how to manage the risks of AI-generated wills in a way that ensures their safe, accessible, and productive use has largely gone unaddressed. This article …

When Constitutional Protection For Religious Liberty Gets Lost In Translation: A Case Study From Washington State, Robert W. Gomulkiewicz

Articles

Protecting religious liberty can present difficult challenges when religious liberty conflicts with laws prohibiting discrimination. Balancing religious liberty and nondiscrimination requires courts to accurately apply the U.S. Supreme Court’s complex First Amendment jurisprudence, including cases that address compelled speech, expressive association, and church autonomy. Amidst all the complexity, protection for religious liberty can get lost in translation. One important venue where protection can get lost in translation is in religious liberty cases decided by state supreme courts. The decisions of state supreme courts are especially significant because they provide the authoritative construction for state statutes and the state constitution. In …

Teaching Cross-Cultural Communication In Law School: Lessons From Medicine, Social Work, And Business, Mireille Butler, Jaclyn Celebrezze

Articles

Legal clients in the United States are increasingly multilingual and multicultural. More than 71 million people living in the United States communicate in a language other than English. Consequently, the lawyer’s duty of shared understanding is taking on new meaning. With the advent of ABA Ethics Opinion 500, cross-cultural communication skills are a lawyer’s ethical duty and a law school’s mandate. Additionally, ABA Standard 303(c) and the potential of increased experiential learning credit requirements make clear that immediate curricular changes are needed. To prepare for the modern practice of law, tomorrow’s lawyers need to develop cross-cultural skills while in law …

Brief Amicus Curiae Regarding Presumption Of Only Partial Invalidity On Behalf Of Former Members Of The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission On Behalf Of Respondents, Trump V. Slaughter, U.S. Supreme Court (No. 25-332), Eric Schnapper

Court Briefs

Summary of Argument:

When a statute is held unconstitutional, the ‘normal rule [is] that partial, rather than facial, invalidation is the required course.” Brockett v. Spokane Arcades, Inc., 472 U.S. 491, 504 (1985). The Court should hold that the removal provision in section 41 is constitutional. But if the Court concludes that section 41 violates Article II, it should “limit the solution to the problem.” Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, 546 U.S. 320, 328 (2006).

The gravamen of the government’s constitutional argument is that the FTC exercises substantial executive authority, and that because of section 41—in contravention …

A State Constitutional Challenge To Washington’S Denial Of Minimum Wage To Incarcerated Workers, Cailin Dahlin

Washington Law Review

This Comment challenges as unconstitutional Washington’s exemption of incarcerated individuals from the state Minimum Wage Act. Incarcerated people in Washington, unprotected by minimum wage guarantees, earn low wages in state-run inmate work programs. This statutory carveout is contrary to the rehabilitative purpose of Washington’s prisons because it impedes incarcerated people’s ability to afford necessities, participate in rehabilitative programs, and reintegrate into society. This exemption is unconstitutional under the state’s cruel punishment clause, because it is disproportionately cruel punishment and an excessive fine that incarcerated workers cannot afford. The exemption is also unconstitutional under the state’s privileges and immunities clause, because …

Democratic Lawyering: Upending The "Hidden Curriculum" To Prepare New Lawyers For A New World, Eduardo R.C. Capulong, Andrew King-Ries, Monte Mills

Articles

Multiple heightening crises reveal the deficiencies and contradictions of legal education, in particular the values it imparts. Perpetuating myths about U.S. democracy and rule of law, the enduring formalist, liberal legalist cast of law school is increasingly at odds with students’ lived experiences. As liberal democracy and the rule of law falter, no longer is relying on the “hidden curriculum” or the historically nebulous and mythical narratives of the law and our legal system sufficient to prepare tomorrow’s lawyers for the challenges faced by our profession. Instead, with a boost from ABA Standard 303, this article draws on the tradition …

Winning The Battle, Losing The War: Rahimi, Women, And The Supreme Court, Dana Raigrodski

Articles

Domestic violence and DV-related firearm use are a grave and persistent issue in the United States and have an extensive harmful and deadly impact in the lives of many women. In its 2024 Rahimi decision, the United States Supreme Court held that, as applied to the facts of the case, 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8), which bans firearms possession by those subject to a DV protective order, is facially constitutional under the Second Amendment. The Court upheld § 922(g)(8) under Bruen’s “Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulations” test, finding that founding era laws included provisions preventing individuals who threaten physical harm …

Brief Of Amici Curiae Fred T. Korematsu Center For Law And Equality, Service Employees International Union, American Federation Of Teachers, American Association Of University Professors, Center For Civil Rights And Critical Justice, Race And Law Centers, And Civil Rights And Advocacy Organizations In Support Of Plaintiff, Susan Godfrey Llp V. Executive Office Of The President, U.S. District Court For The District Of Columbia (Docket No. 1:25-Cv-01107-Lla), Charlotte Garden, Jeremiah Chin, Jessica Levin, Melissa Lee, Jim Davy, Robert S. Chang, Susan Mcmahon

Court Briefs

No abstract provided.

Fighting The Hypothetical: Why Law Firms Should Rethink The Billable Hour In The Generative Ai Era, Nancy B. Rapoport, Joseph R. Tiano, Jr.

Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts

“Fighting the Hypothetical: Why Law Firms Should Rethink the Billable Hour in the Generative AI Era” analyzes how the emergence and adoption of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) will fundamentally disrupt the traditional billable hour model that has dominated the industry since the 1960s. Professor Rapoport and Mr. Tiano contend that GenAI’s ability to perform routine legal tasks quickly and accurately will force law firms to shift away from billing structures based primarily on time spent (or inputs) and toward models that better reflect client value (or outputs).

The authors interviewed law firm leaders to gain an “in the trenches” view …

Client Confidentiality As Data Security, Jonah E. Perlin

Washington Law Review

The duty of confidentiality has been a cornerstone of the attorney-client relationship for more than four centuries. Historically, this duty was not difficult to discharge. All a lawyer had to do to comply was not affirmatively share client information in public without consent. But that has all changed. The same technologies that provide unprecedented benefits of authorized access by lawyers and their clients create unprecedented risks of unauthorized access by others. As a result, although the duty of confidentiality was once synonymous with a duty to keep client confidences secret, today the duty necessitates that lawyers keep client confidences secure …

The Shortseller Enrichment Commission? Whistleblowers, Activist Short Sellers, And The New Privatization Of Public Enforcement, Alexander I. Platt

Washington Law Review

Two developments have transformed the detection of corporate fraud in the last decade: the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Whistleblower Bounty Program (WBP) and the rise of activist short sellers. The WBP offers up financial bounties to individuals who bring forward actionable information about securities fraud. Activist shorts conduct due diligence to identify overvalued public companies, take short positions, reveal the negative information, and then enjoy trading profits if and when the stock tanks. Considered separately, these institutions are widely regarded as socially valuable innovations that help deter fraud.

But, it turns out, they are not fully separate. Activist shorts have …

Google Searching For The Truth: Examining The Admissibility Of Internet Search History, Chisup Kim

Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts

The internet has become more ubiquitously available than ever before, with search engines serving as the portals to an unparalleled amount of information. As a byproduct of this phenomenon, a vast amount of internet search history has also begun to enter legal proceedings as evidence. The most intimate questions that defendants have asked their search engines have begun to be examined under the scope of the Federal Rules of Evidence or a state equivalent. This Comment examines the admissibility of internet search history and provides a general legal framework based on the Federal Rules of Evidence. Drawing upon six cases, …

Generative Ai And Tax Professionals: Current Pr Guidance, Michael Hatfield

Presentations

No abstract provided.

Docket Part 1 (Entries 1 - 4888)

Dockets & Filings: U.S. v. Washington (70-cv-9213)

Includes filings from September 18, 1970 - August 31, 1978

Docket Part 2 (Entries 4889 - 10106)

Dockets & Filings: U.S. v. Washington (70-cv-9213)

Includes filings from August 31, 1978 - July 10, 1985

One Crisis Or Two Problems? Disentangling Rural Access To Justice And The Rural Attorney Shortage, Daria F. Page, Brian R. Farrell

Washington Law Review

We have all seen the headlines: No Lawyer for Miles or Legal Deserts Threaten Justice for All in Rural America. There is a substantial body of literature, across disciplines and for diverse audiences, that looks at access to justice in rural communities and geographies. However, in both the popular and scholarly imaginations, the access to justice crisis has been largely conflated with the shortage of local attorneys in rural areas: When bar associations, lawyers, and legal academics define the problem as not enough lawyers, more lawyers become the obvious solution. Consequently, programs aimed at building pipelines from law schools …

Theseus In The Labyrinth: How State Constitutions Can Slay The Procedural Minotaur, Marcus A. Gadson

Washington Law Review

Civil procedure is one of the biggest hurdles to access to justice. An array of rules and interpretations of those rules have turned lawsuits into meandering mazes with a procedural minotaur waiting to gobble up meritorious claims. The problem is especially acute for the many Americans without abundant resources or access to a lawyer. Fortunately, there is a ready remedy, albeit one access to justice advocates have ignored: state constitutions. Forty state constitutions, which protect hundreds of millions of Americans, generally guarantee “[t]hat all courts shall be open, and every person, for an injury done him in his person, property …

Modalities Of Social Change Lawyering, Christine N. Cimini, Doug Smith

Articles

The last decade has seen the rise of new kinds of grassroots social movements. Movements including Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Sunrise, and #MeToo pushed back against long-standing political, economic, and social crises, including income inequality, racial inequality, police violence, climate change, and the widespread culture of sexual abuse and harassment. As these social change efforts evolve, a growing body of scholarship has begun to theorize the role of lawyers within these new social movements and to identify lawyering characteristics that contribute to sustaining social movements over time. This Article surveys this body of literature and proposes a typology …

How Do Japanese Clients View Their Lawyers -- And How Did Those Views Change Over The Decade Between Surveys? [Bengoshi Ni Taisuru Soshōtōjisha No Hyōka – 10nen De Hyōka Wa Dou Kawatta Ka], Daniel H. Foote

Chapters in Books

A central component of the Civil Litigation Behavior Research Project (2003-2008) and the successor Civil Litigation Research Project (2016-2020) was a set of surveys of litigants in civil cases.1 For comparison purposes, each project also included a survey of the general public, containing a number of identical or similar questions. Among the many aspects of the litigation experience covered in the surveys, several questions focused on the lawyer-client relationship. These included questions about access to lawyers, advice by lawyers, and client evaluations of and level of satisfaction with the lawyers who represented them. After briefly examining some of the ways …

Contingency Fee Conflicts: Attorneys Push For Quick-Kill Settlements When Their Clients Would Be Better Off Going To Trial, Steve Calandrillo, Chryssa V. Deliganis, Neela Brocato

Articles

Despite the checkered history of contingency fees in the practice of law, attorneys often claim that such fee arrangements perfectly align the interests of lawyer and client. After all, contingency fee lawyers proclaim in TV ad after TV ad, "we don’t get paid unless you win." That superficial logic does not withstand economic scrutiny. Utilizing a behavioral economics lens, this Article demonstrates that contingency fee arrangements give attorneys excessive incentives to settle cases that their clients would be better off taking all the way through trial. In addition to highlighting this undertheorized problem in law, we offer normative recommendations to …

Due Process Deportations, Angelica Chazaro

Articles

Should pro-immigrant advocates pursue federally funded counsel for all immigrants facing deportation? For most pro-immigrant advocates and scholars, the answer is self-evident: More lawyers for immigrants would mean more justice for immigrants, and thus, the federal government should fund such lawyers. Moreover, the argument goes, federally funded counsel for immigrants would improve due process and fairness, as well as make immigration enforcement more efficient. This Article argues the opposite: Federally funded counsel is the wrong goal. The majority of expulsions of immigrants now happen outside immigration courts— and thus are impervious to immigration lawyering. Even for those who make it …

Franco I Loved: Reconciling The Two Halves Of The Nation’S Only Government-Funded Public Defender Program For Immigrants, Amelia Wilson

Washington Law Review Online

Detained noncitizens experiencing serious intellectual and mental health disabilities are among the most vulnerable immigrant populations in the United States. The Executive Office for Immigration Review’s (EOIR) creation of the National Qualified Representative Program (NQRP) following a class action lawsuit was an important step in finally bringing meaningful protections to this population. The EOIR pledged to ensure government-paid counsel for those facing removal who had been adjudicated “incompetent” by an immigration judge, as well as other protections for those who had been identified as having a “serious mental disorder” but who had not yet been found incompetent. The NQRP is …

Well-Known Signs: Models Of Disability In Early Modern Islamic Law And Current American, European, And Pakistani Jurisprudence, Elicia Shotland

Washington International Law Journal

Current American, European, and Pakistani legal structures are often insufficient to ensure rights of disabled people, particularly rights of equal access to courts and to act as a witness in court. As the disability rights movement gains ground, judges and legislation drafters are struggling to shift modes of jurisprudence from a medical model that conceptualized disability as a permanent physical affliction to the social model, which locates disability in an individual’s relation to their built and social environments. A review of historical records concerning deaf and hard of hearing participants in legal processes from the Ottoman Empire shows that the …

Refoulement As Pandemic Policy, Haiyun Damon-Feng

Washington International Law Journal

COVID-19 restrictions on access to asylum likely violate non-refoulement obligations under international and federal law, and while they are extreme, they are not unique. There is a small but growing body of scholarly literature that rightly argues that such policies are pretextual covers used to enact restrictive immigration policy goals, but these arguments generally arise from an ahistorical perspective. This article positions restrictive COVID immigration policies in a broader historical context and argues that the United States has a long history of weaponizing fear of disease and contagion from migrants to justify restrictive immigration policies. The article offers a historical …

Race And Washington’S Criminal Justice System: 2021 Report To The Washington Supreme Court, Task Force 2.0

Washington Law Review

RACE & WASHINGTON’S CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM:

EDITOR’S NOTE

As Editors-in-Chief of the Washington Law Review, Gonzaga Law Review, and Seattle University Law Review, we represent the flagship legal academic publications of each law school in Washington State. Our publications last joined together to publish the findings of the first Task Force on Race and the Criminal Justice System in 2011/12. A decade later, we are honored to join once again to present the findings of Task Force 2.0. Law journals have enabled generations of legal professionals to introduce, vet, and distribute new ideas, critiques of existing legal structures, and reflections …

Battle Over Bus Ads: Rethinking Lehman And Speech Restrictions On Public Transportation, Scott Gutierrez

Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts

Public transportation systems carry millions of daily commuters and provide a valuable platform for display advertising. However, transit authorities that open their rolling billboards to speech may be hesitant to carry ads that offend riders and create conflicts with their mission of providing a safe and comfortable commuting experience. Advocacy groups have sued to overturn bans on controversial transit ads, prompting inconsistent rulings about whether such bans violate the First Amendment. These rulings rely on Lehman v. City of Shaker Heights, a divided Supreme Court decision from 1974 that held that the First Amendment did not require the Shaker …

A Study Of Tax Lawyers Discussing Duties, Michael Hatfield, Michelle Kwon

Articles

This Article reports the first qualitative empirical study of U.S. tax lawyers. We interviewed women lawyers who were tax planning specialists. Though this is the first such study of U.S. tax lawyers, this methodology has been used often to study the professional ethics of other tax practitioners around the world. We had three research questions that we sought to answer through dynamic conversations on topics such as the distinctions between good and bad tax plans and good and bad tax lawyers and also the joys and stresses of tax practice. Our first research question was as to the make-up of …

Designing Interdisciplinary, Early Intervention Dispute Resolution Tools To Decrease Evictions And Increase Housing Stability, Christine N. Cimini

Articles

This Article provides a unique glimpse into the development of an early-intervention, pre-court, interdisciplinary dispute resolution project intended to decrease evictions and increase housing stability for recipients of subsidized housing in Seattle. With a grant from the Seattle Housing Authority (SHA), a coalition of non-profit organizations had the rare opportunity to design a dispute resolution system into existence. A dispute system design team was formed and began by examining the interconnected problems of housing instability, eviction, and houselessness. Despite thorough research on dispute system design and extensive meetings with stakeholders, the deign team encountered numerous challenges. This Article identifies the …