Law Commons^™

Outsourcing Self-Regulation, Marsha Griggs

Washington and Lee Law Review

Answerable only to the courts that have the sole authority to grant or withhold the right to practice law, lawyers operate under a system of self-regulation. The self-regulated legal profession staunchly resists external interference from the legislative and administrative branches of government. Yet, with the same fervor that the legal profession defies non-judicial oversight, it has subordinated itself to the controlling influence of a private interest. By outsourcing the mechanisms that dictate admission to the bar, the legal profession has all but surrendered control of the most crucial component of its gatekeeping function to an unregulated industry that profits at …

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Washington and Lee Law Review

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Defense Against The Dark Arts: The Diversity Rationale And The Failed Affirmative Defense Of Affirmative Action, Sheldon Bernard Lyke

Washington and Lee Law Review

Over the past forty years, affirmative action advocates have participated in a defensive campaign where they have admitted that affirmative action is a form of justified discrimination. This Article finds this a dangerous strategy because it allows for the practice of misguided beliefs about race and remedies for racism. When schools fail to fight the pernicious perception that affirmative action is a racial preference, they allow the bulk of society to participate in the belief that there are no other remedial justifications for affirmative action—like remedying an institution’s history of discrimination, or curing a school’s present and ongoing discrimination by …

Using State And Local Governments’ Purchasing Power To Combat Wage Theft, Courtlyn G. Roser-Jones

Washington and Lee Law Review

Regulatory efforts to curb wage theft are failing. And for good reason: these laws generally empower individual workers to pursue their rights when employers neglect to pay them what they are owed and deter employers with substantial penalties. But the vast majority of workers do not take formal action against their employers. So, when the penalties for committing wage theft are almost entirely triggered by claims workers do not bring, they do not deter employer behavior. Instead, because the likelihood of being penalized at all is so low, some employers make profit-maximizing decisions to commit wage theft on a large …

Resistance Proceduralism: A Prologue To Theorizing Procedural Subordination, Portia Pedro

Washington and Lee Law Review

Several legal scholars have discussed the role of slavery within their own family histories and a growing number of scholars are exploring the successes and strategies of lawyers and Black litigants in freedom suits and other litigation in the United States antebellum South. I build on these literatures with a focus on procedure. In this Article, I analyze procedures involved in a few of my ancestral and personal experiences. Some of the experiences with process involved litigation to be free from slavery while other experiences did not explicitly involve any law. But they all involved process.

Engaging in this practice—marshaling …

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Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Deserving Life: How Judicial Application Of Medical Amnesty Laws Perpetuates Substance Use Stigma, Scott Koven

Washington and Lee Law Review

To combat the continued devastation wrought by the opioid crisis in the United States, forty-eight states have passed medical amnesty (or “Good Samaritan”) laws. These laws provide varying forms of protection from criminal punishment for certain individuals if medical assistance is sought at the scene of an overdose. Thus far, the nascent scholarly conversation on medical amnesty has focused on the types of statutory protections available and the effectiveness of these statutes. To summarize, although medical amnesty laws have helped combat drug overdose, the statutes are replete with arbitrary limitations that cabin their life-saving potential.

This Note extends the dialogue …

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Washington and Lee Law Review

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Washington and Lee Law Review

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Constitutional Confidentiality, Natalie Ram, Jorge L. Contreras, Laura M. Beskow, Leslie E. Wolf

Washington and Lee Law Review

Federal Certificates of Confidentiality (“Certificates”) protect sensitive information about human research subjects from disclosure and use in judicial, administrative, and legislative proceedings at both the state and federal levels. When they were first authorized by Congress in the 1970s, Certificates covered sensitive information collected in research about drug addiction use. Today, however, they extend to virtually all personal information gathered by biomedical research studies. The broad reach of Certificates, coupled with their power to override state subpoenas and warrants issued in the context of law enforcement, abortion regulation, and other police powers typically under state control, beg the question whether …

Stay Out Of My Head: Neurodata, Privacy, And The First Amendment, Wayne Unger

Washington and Lee Law Review

The once science-fictional idea of mind-reading is within reach as advancements in brain-computer interfaces, coupled with advanced artificial intelligence, produce neurodata—the collection of substantive thoughts as storable and processable data. But government access to individuals’ neurodata threatens personal autonomy and the right to privacy. While the Fourth Amendment is traditionally considered the source of privacy protections against government intrusion, the First Amendment provides more robust protections with respect to whether governments can access one’s substantive ideas, thoughts, and beliefs. However, many theorists assert that the concept of privacy conflicts with the First Amendment because privacy restricts the flow of information …

Constitutional Resilience, Shannon M. Roesler

Washington and Lee Law Review

Since the New Deal era, our system of constitutional governance has relied on expansive federal authority to regulate economic and social problems of national scale. Throughout the twentieth century, Congress passed ambitious federal statutes designed to address these problems. In doing so, it often enlisted states as regulatory partners—creating a system of shared governance that underpins major environmental statutes, such as the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act. These governance structures remain important today as we seek to adapt our laws and institutions to the serious disruptions of climate change. But recent Supreme Court decisions challenge this long-established …

Cleaning Up The Corporate Opportunity Doctrine Mess: A First Principles Approach, Yifat Naftali Ben Zion

Washington and Lee Law Review

Almost a century ago, a legal dispute over who is the rightful owner of Pepsi-Cola, at the time an unknown syrup company on the verge of bankruptcy, led the Supreme Court of Delaware to develop what is now famously known as the corporate opportunity doctrine. This doctrine is the central framework Delaware courts use to this day to determine whether an officer who seized a business opportunity has breached his fiduciary duties. Despite the doctrine’s old roots, it has thus far failed to reach stable ground. For one, while many corporate law scholars have supported the rule developed following this …

The Impact Of Government Sponsored Segregation On Health Inequities: Addressing Death Gaps Through Reparations, Mariya Denisenko

Washington and Lee Law Review

Government sponsored segregation of urban neighborhoods has detrimentally impacted the health of Black Americans. Over the last century, federal, state, and local governments have promulgated racist laws and policies that shaped the racial divide of communities in major metropolitan cities. This divide has contributed to poor health outcomes and large discrepancies in life expectancy for Black Americans when compared to their White counterparts. While health is impacted by various factors, segregation has been shown to impose various challenges that make it difficult for Black Americans to attain good health.

Segregated Black communities struggle with economic inequality, environmental racism, and face …

How The Blockchain Undermined Digital Ownership, Aaron Perzanowski

Washington and Lee Law Review

The shift from a market built around the sale of tangible goods to one premised on the licensing of digital content and services has done significant and lasting damage to the notion of individual ownership. The emergence of blockchain technology, while certainly not necessary to reverse these trends, promised an opportunity to attract investment and demonstrate consumer demand for marketplaces that recognize meaningful digital ownership. Simultaneously, it offered an avenue for alleviating worries about hypothetical widespread reproduction and unchecked distribution of copyrighted works. Instead, many of the most visible blockchain projects in recent years—the proliferation of new cryptocurrencies and the …

Raising The Floor From The Back Door: Shareholder Proposals As A Mechanism For Raising Minimum Wage, Laura Carrier

Washington and Lee Law Review

When adjusted to reflect inflation, the federal minimum wage is almost 40 percent lower than it was in 1970. The Biden Administration tried and failed to legislatively raise the minimum wage, and political deadlock will continue to kill legislative change. The shareholder proposal, a nonbinding recommendation to management that shareholders can submit for a vote at a public corporation’s annual meeting, presents a path for improving the wages of many workers in the absence of federal legislation. This Note analyzes the best approach to crafting a shareholder proposal on minimum wage that will prompt an effective increase in the minimum …

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Washington and Lee Law Review

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Washington and Lee Law Review

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Keynote Address, Sultan Meghji

Washington and Lee Law Review

Keynote address presented virtually at the Washington and Lee Law Review's 54th Annual Lara D. Gass Symposium: The Future of E-Commerce: Is It on a Blockchain? on Friday, March 17, 2023 in Lexington, Virginia.

Digital Property Cycles, Joshua Fairfield

Washington and Lee Law Review

The present downturn in non-fungible token (“NFT”) markets is no cause for immediate alarm. There have been multiple cycles in both the legal and media focus on digital intangible property, and these cycles will recur. The cycles are easily explainable: demand for intangible property is constant, even increasing. The legal regimes governing ownership of these assets are unstable and poorly suited to satisfying the preferences of buyers and sellers. The combination of demand and poor legal regulation gives rise to the climate of fraud that has come to characterize NFTs, but it has nothing to do with the value of …

Mitigating The Legal Challenges Associated With Blockchain Smart Contracts: The Potential Of Hybrid On-Chain/Off-Chain Contracts, Niloufer Selvadurai

Washington and Lee Law Review

Tantamount with the increasing application of blockchain technologies around the world, the use of blockchain-based smart contracts has rapidly risen. In a “smart contract,” computer protocols automatically facilitate, verify, and enforce arrangements made between parties on a blockchain. Such smart contracts offer a variety of commercial benefits, notably immutability and increased efficiency facilitated by removing the need for a trusted intermediary. However, as discussed in recent legal scholarship, it is difficult for smart contracts to uphold certain fundamental principles of contract law. Translating concepts of individual intention and responsibility into the decentralized space of blockchain is problematic. Aggregating such individual …

Tax Reporting As Regulation Of Digital Financial Markets, Young Ran (Christine) Kim

Washington and Lee Law Review

FTX’s recent collapse highlights the overall instability that blockchain assets and digital financial markets face. While the use of blockchain technology and crypto assets is widely prevalent, the associated market is still largely unregulated, and the future of digital asset regulation is also unclear. The lack of clarity and regulation has led to public distrust and has called for more dedicated regulation of digital assets. Among those regulatory efforts, tax policy plays an important role. This Essay introduces comprehensive regulatory frameworks for blockchain-based assets that have been introduced globally and domestically, and it shows that tax reporting is the key …

The Internet, Personal Jurisdiction, And Daos, Matthew R. Mcguire

Washington and Lee Law Review

Global connectivity is at an all-time high, and sovereign state law has not fully caught up with the technological innovations enabling that connectivity. TCP/IP—the communications protocol allowing computers on different networks to speak with each other—wasn’t adopted by ARPANET and the Defense Data Network until January 1983. That’s only forty years ago. And the World Wide Web wasn’t released to the general public until August 1991, less than thirty-five years ago. The first Bitcoin block was mined on January 3, 2009, less than fifteen years ago.

Legal doctrine doesn’t develop that fast, especially in legal systems heavily based around judicial …

The Impact Of Insulating Immigration Courts From Judicial Review On America’S New Generation Of Families, Christian Sanchez Leon

Washington and Lee Law Review

This Note could be read as another Note addressing Congress’s power to strip jurisdiction from Article III courts. Yet, when this power is exercised in the immigration context, its impact extends far beyond the realm of checks and balances. Instead, this Note is about the insulation of the Board of Immigration Appeals (“BIA”) and its unfettered ability to create, interpret, and adjudicate its own laws. Not allowing courts to review BIA decisions leaves mixed-status families vulnerable to the harsh consequences of inherently arbitrary decisions made by executive officers.

These practices go against the established common law principles of family unity. …

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Washington and Lee Law Review

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Washington and Lee Law Review

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Federal Bureaucratic Studies, Jesse M. Cross

Washington and Lee Law Review

A vast literature has developed in legal scholarship on the topic of bureaucratic governance. To date, this literature has focused squarely on the executive branch. Yet a second bureaucracy also exists in the federal government: the congressional bureaucracy. Recent legislation scholarship has brought this bureaucracy into focus—documenting its traits, practices, and culture. In so doing, it has created a rich new opportunity for cross-disciplinary dialogue—one where executive-branch studies and legislative studies collaborate toward a larger understanding of how bureaucracy operates, and can operate, in a presidentialist system.

To begin that cross-disciplinary conversation, this Article turns to five themes in the …

Tribute To Professor Joan Shaughnessy, Alan M. Trammell, Joan M. Shaughnessy, Mary Z. Natkin, Brian C. Murchison, Mark H. Grunewald, Barry Sullivan, Michelle L. Drumbl

Washington and Lee Law Review

A tribute to Professor Joan Shaughnessy, who served on the faculty of the Washington and Lee University School of Law from 1983 to 2022. A recognized scholar and teacher in areas of civil procedure, federal courts, evidence, family law, and poverty law, Shaun was appointed as W&L's inaugural Roger D. Groot Professor of Law in 2012.

Learning From Mistakes, Irene Oritseweyinmi Joe

Washington and Lee Law Review

Much of the attention following the reversal of a defendant’s wrongful conviction focuses on the role the police or the prosecutor played in perpetuating the injustice. To the extent that the public defender institution’s role is considered, it is often limited to its failure to provide effective assistance of counsel. This Article challenges the conventional wisdom that the public defender institution’s role in addressing a wrongful conviction is limited to ineffective assistance of counsel claims and ends once a wrongful conviction is reversed. At minimum, the legal profession’s mandate for competent representation requires public defenders, and the institutions that house …

Property And The Right To Enter, Bethany R. Berger

Washington and Lee Law Review

On June 23, 2021, the Supreme Court decided Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, holding that laws that authorize entry to land are takings without regard to duration, impact, or the public interest. The decision runs roughshod over precedent, but it does something more. It undermines the important place of rights to enter in preserving the virtues of property itself. This Article examines rights to enter as a matter of theory, tradition, and constitutional law, arguing that the law has always recognized their essential role. Throughout history, moreover, expansions of legal exclusion have often reflected unjust domination antithetical to property norms. …