Law Commons^™

Are You Smarter Than A 1l?, Jennifer L. Dubetz

Law Faculty Scholarship

Do you ever wonder “what in the library is obvious to law students but not to me and conversely, what is obvious to me but not to law students?”

I decided to find out by sitting in on some of the 1L Introduction to Legal Research classes.

This turned out to be a valuable experience in which I increased my ability to use the library’s print and digital offerings, learned how class formats and technology have changed in the years since I was a student, and I developed a good understanding of what a research plan and log are and …

Institutionalizing The Trade-Labor Nexus, Yueming Yan

Michigan Journal of International Law

While scholars have extensively explored the evolution of labor provisions in trade agreements, less attention has been paid to the institutional mechanisms that operationalize these provisions. This article addresses this gap by offering a comparative analysis of labor compliance models that are emerging across jurisdictions.

Recognizing that no institutional design is without trade-offs, this article applies the theory of comparative institutional analysis to evaluate existing models—not by asking whether they are (in)effective in the abstract, but: (in)effective compared to what? Specifically, it examines the strengths and limitations of various institutional mechanisms using benchmarks that matter to policymakers, including procedural efficiency, …

Active Limited Partners Flunk Functional Test, Karen Burke

UF Law Faculty Publications

In 1977, Congress enacted section 1402(a)(13), which exempts limited partners "as such" from self-employment tax on their share of partnership income. A half century later, active investment management professionals have claimed limited partner status to avoid self-employment tax on investment management fees, seemingly standing this anti-abuse rule on its head. While the Treasury twice issued proposed regulations to clarify and modernize the definition of a limited partner, these attempts encountered a firestorm of protest. The Tax Court's controversial Soroban decision rejected claims that state-law limited partners are automatically exempt from self-employment tax, holding that a functional analysis is required to …

Co-Matching: Towards Human–Model Collaborative Legal Case Matching, Chen Huang, Xinwei Yang, Yang Deng, Wenqiang Lei, Jiancheng Lv, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent efforts have aimed to improve AI models in legal case matching by integrating legal domain knowledge. However, successful legal case matching requires the tacit knowledge of legal practitioners, which is difficult to verbalize and encode into models. This emphasizes the crucial role of involving legal practitioners in high-stakes legal case matching. To address this, we propose a collaborative matching framework called Co-Matching, which encourages both the model and the legal practitioner to participate in the matching process, integrating tacit knowledge. Unlike existing methods that rely solely on the model, Co-Matching allows both the legal practitioner and the model to …

An Exploratory Analysis Of Neurocognitive Performance And Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (Ptsd) Among Latinx Asylum Seekers, Elsie A. Arias

Doctoral Dissertations

Asylum seekers are exposed to violence and traumatic events in their home countries at high rates, leading to mental health challenges such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PTSD symptoms and comorbidities such as depression and alcohol misuse are associated with impacts to multiple domains of cognitive functioning among populations such as Veterans. However, the neurocognitive performance of Latinx asylum seekers who experience PTSD symptoms are under-documented in the current literature despite its meaningful impact on clinical care engagement and navigation of the legal process. This study utilized an exploratory, quantitative, cross-sectional design to examine whether higher levels of self-reported PTSD, …

Masthead

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Procedural Drift: How Judicial Restraint Enables Legalized Backsliding, Dessie Otachliska

Washington and Lee Law Review

This Article introduces Procedural Drift, a new theory of constitutional erosion in which legality itself enables democratic decline. Legal forms remain intact, but their constraining force quietly recedes as procedural doctrines withdraw courts from sites of contestation. Executive power expands not by defying law, but by strategically complying with it—exploiting judicial restraint to evade review.

Building on Bruce Ackerman’s theory of constitutional moments and Kim Lane Scheppele’s concept of autocratic legalism, this Article develops a U.S.-specific account of democratic backsliding that is lawful, gradual, and institutionally embedded. It traces how judicial restraint—operating amid partisan alignment and epistemic fragmentation—erodes legal checks …

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 Coming Privatization Of Corporate Law, Dorothy S. Lund, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

For more than a century, American corporate law has revolved around a simple competitive premise: State governments supply corporate law while companies choose their state of incorporation, and the market rewards the state offering the best corporate law product. Delaware’s longstanding market dominance (especially for public companies) is often explained through the confluence of its unusually attractive institutional package: expert judges, extensive precedent, a specialized bar, an enabling statute, and a legislature that — at least traditionally — treats corporate law as something to be calibrated technocratically rather than politicized.

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 …

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 …

What Is To Be Done About The Radical Far-Right?, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

The far Right in America has become radical. In the process, it has outmaneuvered the progressives. In the first months of his second mandate, President Trump has mounted a revolution (or counterrevolution) against the liberal democratic state. Steve Bannon said he was Leninist and wanted to “smash the state.” President Trump has done just that. In this essay, I explore the far Right’s embrace of Lenin. I return to the Hegelian roots of Lenin’s politics to explain what he meant by “smashing the state machine.” I then argue that the Left should reclaim Lenin’s dialectics and his call, in the …

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 …

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 …

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 …

The Risk-Assessment Case For Worldwide Public Health Regulation Of The Concussion Crisis In Sports, Marcus Moore, Charles H. Tator

All Faculty Publications

The support of the medical profession was indispensable in the USA and Canada to enacting legislation addressing public health issues such as drunk driving, smoking, and bicycle helmets. The sports concussion crisis is a major public health concern in Canada and in many other countries.