Digital Commons Network^™

How The Dod Discourages Military Families From Seeking Mental Health Counseling, Christina Welch

Seattle University Law Review

The Department of Defense’s (DoD) administration of the Exceptional Family Member Program (EFMP) presents significant barriers to mental health care access for military spouses and children. This paper explores how the EFMP, though designed to support military families with special needs, inadvertently creates barriers to mental health treatment. Military family members often do not seek mental health treatment to avoid the program's mandatory enrollment requirements. Military family members often view enrollment in the program undesirable because enrollment can restrict the pool of potential future duty assignment locations that are available to service members.

The lack of comprehensive data collection by …

2025, Richard Delgado

Seattle University Law Review

"In a cutting and provocative social critique in one of the more extended Rodrigo Chronicles, Richard Delgado in 2025 employs skillful narrative—one of CRT’s many contributions to legal scholarship —to tell a gripping story of just how far the nation has descended into darkness with President Trump’s re-election. In Delgado’s vision, law professors—along with other political opponents of the President: immigrants, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, women, the underserved—have targets on their backs."

-excerpt from Kevin Johnson's review of 2025

The Preventative Care Gap: Completing The Aca’S Vision For Health, Abby Nagaich

Seattle University Law Review

This Note examines the preventive care mandate under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the legal, political, and practical challenges that threaten its effectiveness. While the ACA significantly expanded access to no-cost preventive services, gaps remain—particularly in behavioral health, obesity management, and equitable service delivery. Ongoing litigation, potential administrative rollbacks, and shifting political leadership further destabilize this critical component of public health policy.

This Note argues that for the ACA to fulfill its original promise—and for any health framework to succeed—preventive care must be redefined as a comprehensive, early intervention approach grounded in both systemic access and patient education. It …

Evaluation Of Solar Reflective Pigments For Use In Direct-To-Metal Coatings, William J. Diment

Master's Theses

Solar reflective coatings offer a promising strategy to mitigate the urban heat island effect by reducing absorption of near-infrared solar energy. This thesis project investigates the feasibility of incorporating near-infrared reflective pigments into waterborne direct-to-metal (DTM) latex coating systems while maintaining acceptable color comparison characteristics and coating performance. An all acrylic latex DTM formulation with titanium dioxide as the sole pigment was prepared and tinted with a variety of conventional and solar reflective commercial colorants across the yellow, red, blue, and green color ranges. Coatings were evaluated for solar reflectance, CIELAB color, gloss, contrast ratio, rheological behavior, accelerated ultraviolet weathering …

Effects Of Atomic Oxygen Exposure On Stressed Drag Sail Materials For Low Earth Orbit Applications, Nazanin Sadeghian Dezaki

Master's Theses

As low Earth orbit (LEO) has become an increasingly valuable region for satellite operations, it has grown increasingly congested. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) deorbit regulations require satellites to be deorbited within 5 years of launch, and drag sails represent a practical means of meeting this requirement. An important consideration for drag sail design is the effect of atomic oxygen (AO) on sail materials. To address the gap in the literature regarding the behavior of stressed drag sail materials under AO exposure, a new test plate was manufactured for the California Polytechnic State University minimum atmospheric experimentation (MAX) AO chamber. …

From Seizure To Settlement: Liberated Africans, Imperial Law, And Labor In The Indian Ocean World, 1810–1860, Holly S. Mcfate

Master's Theses

This thesis examines the relationship between British antislavery, imperial law, and labor management in the western Indian Ocean during the first half of the nineteenth century. Centered on the 1821 capture and condemnation of the slave schooner Industry by HMS Menai, the study employs a microhistorical methodology to reconstruct the legal and administrative processes that governed the lives of Africans seized from slave ships after their liberation. Drawing upon Vice-Admiralty Court records, Colonial Office correspondence, naval logbooks, and administrative registers from The National Archives (UK) and the Mauritius Archives, the thesis follows the transition of captive Africans from maritime interception …

Accessibility In The Edtech Era: The Growth In Implementation Oflearning Technologies And Thestudents Who Are Left Behind, Madeleine Braksick

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Educational Technology (EdTech) has gained popularity in recent years, enabling distance learning and connectedness across school districts, and among students, teachers, and families alike. However, vague or nonexistent standards for regulating these technologies have led to students with rights to special education services not having those services upheld to the same standard as traditional educational mechanisms. While the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) has been modified over time to form heightened standards for making education appropriate for all students, it has consistently fallen short in its regulation of both assistive and educational technologies. This Note explores the consequences of …

Technology Before, During, And After Incarceration: Current Product Landscape, Sociotechnical Concerns, And Legal Considerations In The U.S. Context, Yael Eiger, Taylor Hansen, Teanna Barrett, Jevan Hutson, Bryce Clayton Newell, Franziska Roesner

Articles

Emerging technology, including AI, is proliferating throughout the U.S. carceral system. These technologies are marketed to prisons and police departments and then procured using taxpayer money. Previous investigative reporting has exposed troubling kickback schemes, unconstitutional data collection practices, and biased algorithmic outcomes in a handful of prominent technologies (e.g., Flock, Palantir, Clearview AI, COMPAS). In this work, we consider the broader ecosystem of carceral technologies: we catalog 122 products from 53 companies selling technology to carceral institutions. In a collaboration among computer science, law, and surveillance studies scholars, we surface sociotechnical, ethical, and legal concerns related to the use and …

Table Of Contents

Washington Law Review

No abstract provided.

Anti-Allyship And The Indirect Subordination Of Queer People, Richard Luedeman

Washington Law Review

This Article theorizes and interrogates anti-allyship as a central mechanism of modern subordination of queer people. While not new, anti-allyship is expanding rapidly under the second Trump administration. Defined as the deliberate imposition of legal, financial, and reputational costs on those who support queer individuals or institutions, anti-allyship is a strategy of indirect oppression. It targets not queer people directly, but the infrastructure of support on which queer communities rely: clinicians, educators, family members, researchers, and organizations. In doing so, it often evades the formal protections of civil rights law, which remain tethered to anticlassification models and status-based protections that …

Disability And Constitutional Legitimacy, Katherine A. Macfarlane

Washington Law Review

Disability classifications can take one of two forms. The more familiar form targets people with disabilities on account of their disability and harms them. This type of government classification receives deferential rational basis review and is therefore difficult to challenge. But government action that benefits people with disabilities also classifies on the basis of disability and receives rational basis review. This Article focuses on classifications that provide preferential treatment to disabled people precisely because of their disability—through disability affirmative action programs—and argues that their legitimacy is bolstered, not weakened, by the rational basis standard. It does so by distinguishing the …

Cross-Enforcing The Plain Smell Doctrine, Alexa Perez

Washington Law Review

In a state that has legalized marijuana, does a state officer have probable cause to conduct a warrantless search of a vehicle based on the smell of marijuana alone, because marijuana is still prohibited under federal law? This Article is the first to consider that unsettled question. Over the last ten years, almost every state has altered the legality of marijuana in some way, either through decriminalization or legalization. Yet the possession, use, and cultivation of marijuana continue to be illegal at the federal level. Prior to these reforms, state courts generally upheld warrantless searches of vehicles based on nothing …

Presidential Noncompliance And Judicial Response: A Two-Branch Dialectic, Seth Waxman

Washington Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Canons Fell Silent: An Analysis Of The Supreme Court's Failure To Use Statutory Interpretation Tools In Sackett V. Epa, Lauren Carlsen

Washington Law Review

In 2023, the United States Supreme Court denied decades of precedent, agency action, and the proper use of canons of interpretation in its decision in Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency (Sackett). This case adopted the “continuous surface connection” test, which requires an indistinguishable surface water connection between a wetland and a navigable water to assert Clean Water Act jurisdiction over the wetland. This limitation on agency authority under the Clean Water Act was created through a statutory analysis that failed to apply the “Plain Meaning” and “Whole Act” canons of statutory interpretation. The Court narrowly applied the meaning of …

"Speech Swept Up"—The Constitutionality Of State Prohibitions Of Conversion Therapy For Lgbtq+ Youth, Lauren A. Chivers

Washington Law Review

Since 2012, individual states have passed laws prohibiting state-licensed mental health professionals from engaging in conversion therapy with minor clients. Despite the breadth of research undermining its efficacy and documenting harms, the practice of conversion therapy persists. State regulation of conversion therapy—and thereby licensed professionals’ conduct with their clients—has emerged as a contentious issue for the judiciary. Most significantly, the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on the matter for the first time in 2026. In Chiles v. Salazar, the Court addressed a challenge to Colorado’s conversion therapy ban, confronting fundamental questions about this unsettled area of First Amendment law. …

Deaf In Prison: The Courts' Failure To Remedy Ada Violations In Prisons, Ruby Grossman

Washington Law Review

The carceral system is one of the many institutions that fails to adequately accommodate individuals with disabilities. D/deaf individuals specifically face a severe lack of resources and accommodations, pervasive mistreatment, and inadequate services while incarcerated. While the Supreme Court has recognized that individuals necessarily do not retain all their constitutional rights while incarcerated, there are constitutional rights and statutory protections with which prisons are required to comply. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is one such statute. When it comes to D/deaf incarcerated individuals, the ADA requires that prisons provide reasonable accommodations so those individuals are not deprived of programs, …

The Impact Of New York's 2026 Climate Law Retreat, Jonathan A. Binder, Vincent M. Nolette

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

On May 26, 2026, New York State enacted significant revisions to its 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA). The 2026 Amendments, which include changes to the greenhouse gas (GHG) emission accounting methodology, the statewide GHG emission limits, and the requirement to adopt implementing regulations, collectively weaken the Act's ambition. New York’s retreat from state climate action after championing it for years reflects a broader national trend of de-prioritizing mitigation efforts.

The 2026 Amendments will have vast and important consequences for the implementation of the CLCPA. Numerous actions will need to be updated through rulemaking, guidance, or other administrative …

Developing A Humpback Whale Vocalization Detector Using Machine Learning Models, Lucas Kantorowski

Master's Theses

Humpback whale songs are notoriously complex. Identification of humpback whale song units requires bioacousticians to tediously listen, analyze, and annotate collected sound data. Even sparse data requires listening to the entirety of the collected acoustic data. In this study, three hours of audio containing over one-thousand humpback whale song units was collected in Monterey Bay, California.

Prior studies have seen success using convolutional neural networks by performing image classification on hundreds of hours worth of spectrograms. Our study uses traditional machine learning models, as they are less computationally demanding, and require less data.

We use time splitting and Mel-frequency cepstrum …

Preserving Structural Alias Information Across The Mlir-To-Llvm Lowering Boundary, Shravan Sheth

Master's Theses

Machine learning training and inference workloads run at massive scale, where the efficiency of generated machine code directly affects throughput and energy consumption. The compilers that lower model specifications to hardware instructions rely on optimization passes that can only exploit information visible in the representations they operate on. MLIR, the intermediate representation framework underlying production machine learning compilers such as IREE and Triton, is designed so that each abstraction level can encode semantics that lower levels cannot represent. One example is memref.subview, which partitions a buffer into typed regions with explicit offsets and sizes, making structural non-overlap provable from the …

Sustainable Management Of Soilborne Pathogens In Strawberry Production Through Host Resistance And Sanitation Practices, Maria G. Alvarez Arredondo

Master's Theses

Strawberry production in California is significantly impacted by soilborne pathogens that reduce plant productivity and increase management costs. This research addressed management of these pathogens through two independent approaches: evaluation of host resistance in strawberry cultivars and assessment of sanitation practices for reducing pathogen movement between fields.

Macrophomina root rot, caused by Macrophomina phaseolina, was evaluated over two growing seasons (2024–2025 and 2025–2026) using field trials at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. In Year 1, disease incidence varied widely among genotypes, with mortality ranging from 1.3% to 88.8% and an average mortality of 26.4%. Area under the …

Research And Assessment Of Needs For Sign And Signal Maintenance, Megan White, Eric Green

Kentucky Transportation Center Research Report

Kentucky Transportation Cabinet (KYTC) sign and signal crews have expressed multiple concerns related to compensation, expertise, and having the financial and personnel resources needed to help the agency comply with Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) guidelines while continuing to perform routine job duties. Internal reorganizations and personnel changes have reduced staffing and budgets available to underwrite the activities of sign and signal crews even as workloads have remained steady or increased. To document the challenges facing sign and signal crews and associated engineering staff, Kentucky Transportation Center (KTC) researchers administered a statewide survey. Respondents gave their perspectives on …

Building And Facility Asset Inventory Assessment And Maintenance, Catherine Keathley, Bethany Paris, Jon Wilcoxson

Kentucky Transportation Center Research Report

The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet (KYTC) manages approximately 1,500 buildings statewide, including facilities such as office buildings, maintenance and equipment garages, and storage sheds. Because managing buildings and properties requires considerable effort, agency decision makers need reliable monitoring and management tools that generate and organize data which can be used to determine the best course of action for facility maintenance and replacement. In addition to assessing the Cabinet’s building inventory, this report advances recommendations to improve the collection, management, and reporting of facility-related data. Assessment of the inventory managed by KYTC included geolocation of all properties and the buildings therein. Once …

Some Realism About Constitutional Remedies, Thomas P. Schmidt, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court has wavered between two approaches to questions of executive power, which are often labeled institutional formalism and realism. Formalism treats an institution like the presidency as a “black box” to which the Constitution assigns certain powers. In Trump v. Hawaii,  for example, the Supreme Court upheld President Trump’s infamous travel ban by focusing not on the “particular President” and his past call for a “complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” but rather on “the authority of the Presidency itself.” That is the language of institutional formalism.

Realism, on the other hand, peers into the “black …

The Impact Of Ai Companions On Family Law, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

People of all ages and backgrounds regularly use AI companions — virtual friends, lovers, and confidantes powered by artificial intelligence. As a new form of relationship, this development poses novel doctrinal and policy questions for family law. As a doctrinal matter, what does child neglect look like when a parent delegates caretaking to an AI companion? How should standards for elder neglect adapt to the widespread use of robotic caregivers? Should lawmakers impose mandatory reporting requirements on therapy bots if children share experiences of abuse or neglect? And can people designate an AI companion as a health care proxy? As …

Public Perceptions Of Family Caregiving Of Children Versus Older Adults, Elizabeth S. Scott, Tamar Kricheli-Katz

Faculty Scholarship

The population of older adults in the United States is growing at a rapid rate, both because people are living longer lives and because older adults are an increasingly large share of the population as baby boomers age. It is predicted that by 2030, one in ¿ve adults in the United States will be of retirement age, and one in six people worldwide will be age 60 or older. By 2034 there will be more adults age 65 and older in this country than minor children under age 18.

Among the important consequences of this demographic trend will be a …

Rethinking Ethics For An Era Of Trusted Computational Tools, Kristin M Kostick-Quenet, Meghan Hurley, John Herrington, Eric A Storch

Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy Staff Publications

Computer perception (CP) technologies are poised to deliver near real-time behavioral insights with high precision. As technical barriers recede, our field's ethical focus must shift from "Can we trust the data?" to "Should we use it here, and how?" We propose a contextual ethics framework that: (1) defines the appropriate scope of CP integration; (2) advocates codesigned roadmaps to manage expectations and epistemic conflict; (3) expands evaluation beyond performance metrics to humanistic outcomes; and (4) anticipates future high performance systems to safeguard dignity, empathy, and shared decision-making in clinical care.

Good Intentions, Mixed Messages: Considering Mental Health In Attorney Discipline, Sarah J. Schendel

Suffolk University Law School Faculty Works

The legal profession urges struggling lawyers to seek help—but what happens when those same lawyers become the subject of discipline? As mental health challenges among lawyers become more widely acknowledged and understood, the disciplinary systems that govern the profession remain uneven and opaque in their treatment of mental health as a mitigating factor. This Article presents the first comprehensive review of over a decade of disciplinary decisions and admonitions in Massachusetts, focusing on how mental health is considered during sanctioning and whether current standards meaningfully reflect the profession’s stated commitments to fairness, public protection, and attorney well-being.

The analysis reveals …

Veiled Justice: Secularism And The Hijab Across Democracies, Mohamed ‘Arafa

Seattle University Law Review

For much of 2022, Iran was gripped by widespread protests led by women who openly challenged the regime’s authority, particularly its compulsory veiling laws, following the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody. Women around the globe came around and showed solidarity with the women in Iran. However, in non-Islamic countries and societies, one can still make out many prejudices and stereotyping connected to the question of whether and to what extent veiling is mandatory for women according to Shārīe’ā law. Is wearing the hijab a choice, or rather, an essential religious practice that religious Muslim women need to obey? …

Regulating Wellness: Reimagining Legal Frameworks In The Age Of Preventative And Aspirational Health, Barbara Zabawa

UMKC Law Review

The 2025 Wellness Law Symposium was held October 3, 2025 at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law.

Wellness Disputes, Maria Cudowska

UMKC Law Review

No abstract provided.