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Articles 1 - 30 of 448
Full-Text Articles in Human Rights Law
Masthead
Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice
No abstract provided.
Generative Adversarial Discrimination, Josh Fairfield
Generative Adversarial Discrimination, Josh Fairfield
Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice
Anti-discrimination law assumes that discrimination can be detected and rectified, that the evidentiary burden of the plaintiff can in fact be met. But the evolutionary logic of AI training causes it to target vulnerable groups, lie about reasoning, and above all resist detection. Because of hidden core prompts in generative AI systems, and how those prompts interact with the nature of AI training and deployment, AI will often actively hide discrimination rather than surface and address it. Stopping this will be difficult. At present, neither humans or AI can detect this emergent dark-pattern behavior. Without legal intervention, the broad use …
Before The Last Breath: How Alabama’S Nitrogen Execution Adoption Created A Procedural Crisis On Death Row, Caroline E. Penfield
Before The Last Breath: How Alabama’S Nitrogen Execution Adoption Created A Procedural Crisis On Death Row, Caroline E. Penfield
Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice
In 2024 and 2025, Alabama executed eleven people. During this time and in the years leading up to it, the State botched multiple lethal injections. Seeking an ostensibly constitutional way to continue carrying out executions, Alabama introduced death by nitrogen gas suffocation. The problems with lethal injection are not unique to Alabama, but Alabama was the first to adopt and use the novel nitrogen gas method, despite concerns from medical professionals, the public, and inmates themselves. Alabama put little to no protocol in place for inmates to exercise their statutory right to elect this method, leading to confusion and harm. …
Reel It In: Untangling The Circuit Split On The Constitutionality Of Geofence Warrants Under The Fourth Amendment, Kate P. Risser
Reel It In: Untangling The Circuit Split On The Constitutionality Of Geofence Warrants Under The Fourth Amendment, Kate P. Risser
Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice
This Note examines geofence warrants and their ongoing threat to constitutionally protected rights such as privacy, speech, and assembly. Part I will provide background information on geofence warrants and examine the prominent justifications for the use of the warrants. Part II will examine how law enforcement’s use of geofence warrants threatens citizens’ constitutionally protected fundamental rights like privacy and reproductive rights. Specifically, Part II addresses how geofence warrants disproportionately target and affect women, people of color, and low-income individuals. Part III will detail the history of the Fourth Amendment tracing its roots to before the Founding Era then exploring applicable …
Table Of Contents
Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice
No abstract provided.
The Lives Of Fritz Haber And Of International Law: Entwined Tales Of Tragedy And Irony, Mark A. Drumbl, C. William Vardy
The Lives Of Fritz Haber And Of International Law: Entwined Tales Of Tragedy And Irony, Mark A. Drumbl, C. William Vardy
Scholarly Articles
This article recounts the life of international law through the story of a single individual. This is the narrative of biographical international law. The subject — equally protagonist and antagonist — of this article is Fritz Haber, a German-Jewish scientist born in 1868. Devoted to the Kaiser, Haber was declared a war criminal by the Allies following World War I for having been ‘the father’ of chemical warfare. Haber argued that chemical weapons were more humane than conventional weapons. While under this shadow, Haber also won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1920 for his pioneering work with ammonia …
Comparative Visions For U.S. Group-Based Asylum Proposal, Lauren N. Hughes
Comparative Visions For U.S. Group-Based Asylum Proposal, Lauren N. Hughes
Scholarly Articles
Images of asylum seekers and migrants desperate to enter the United States at the southern border abound in U.S. media. Less familiar to the American public, but intertwined with the highly politicized modern migration crisis, is the ever-growing backlog of pending asylum applications before both the Asylum Office and Immigration Courts. This backlog has many causes, including underresourced agencies, a growing number of asylum applicants, the high evidentiary burden and complexities inherent to asylum law, and the lack of counsel for many asylum seekers. In response to this crippling backlog, some scholars propose the adoption of a “group-based” asylum mechanism. …
The Disability History Of Brown V. Board Of Education, Britney R. Wilson
The Disability History Of Brown V. Board Of Education, Britney R. Wilson
Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice
In 1952, two years before the Supreme Court of the United States decided Brown v. Board of Education, Black deaf students in Washington, D.C., who had been prohibited from attending the local school for white deaf students and forced to go to school in Maryland, won the right to be educated in their hometowns in Miller v. Board of Education of District of Columbia. Brown is heralded as one of the most important racial justice cases of all time. It overturned Plessy v. Ferguson’s longstanding “separate but equal” mandate and ruled that the segregation of students based …
Bad Parenting On Trial: How Gender, Race, And Class Shape Parental Responsibility Prosecutions And Laws For School Shootings, Makayla R. Foust
Bad Parenting On Trial: How Gender, Race, And Class Shape Parental Responsibility Prosecutions And Laws For School Shootings, Makayla R. Foust
Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice
In 2021, James and Jennifer Crumbley became the first parents in the United States to be found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in connection with their son’s school shooting that killed four people and injured multiple others. As school shootings continue to devastate communities across the country, prosecutors are increasingly holding parents criminally liable for their children’s actions. This development raises fundamental questions about justice, accountability, and the limits of criminal liability. While these laws aim to curb gun violence by enforcing parental accountability, they will disproportionately affect marginalized communities, particularly along gender, racial, and socioeconomic lines. As legal precedent expands, …
Masthead
Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice
No abstract provided.
Table Of Contents
Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice
No abstract provided.
Dignity By Design: A Human-Centered Framework For Ethical Ai, Armin Tadayon
Dignity By Design: A Human-Centered Framework For Ethical Ai, Armin Tadayon
Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice
The launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 has triggered a global arms race–both among private technology companies and between nation states–for dominance in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). If this nascent technology, which is permeating every aspect of our lives as more companies across multiple sectors deploy it for a variety of functions, malfunctions or behaves in unanticipated ways, it can severely affect individuals in their day-to-day lives with broader consequences for society at large. As such, as AI permeates every aspect of our lives, and in some instances, begins to replace humans and human decision-making, it is imperative …
Chevron Deference, Prospective Gay Parents, And The Need For A Centralized Child Welfare System, Mantas Grigorovicius
Chevron Deference, Prospective Gay Parents, And The Need For A Centralized Child Welfare System, Mantas Grigorovicius
Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice
For over four decades, Chevron deference allowed federal agencies to exercise considerable discretion in interpreting laws, enabling them to implement broad regulatory agendas. This deference was pivotal for administrative agencies, such as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), in shaping public policy. However, in 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court decided to overturn this precedent, shifting power from agencies to courts and potentially reshaping the regulatory landscape. This Article examines the implications of this change within the context of child welfare, focusing on HHS’s role in foster care. As states often rely on taxpayer-funded private child-placing agencies to …
Imprisoned Without A Verdict: The Constitutional Crisis Of Pre-Trial Solitary Confinement, Symone R. Gibbs
Imprisoned Without A Verdict: The Constitutional Crisis Of Pre-Trial Solitary Confinement, Symone R. Gibbs
Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice
Kalief Browder’s name endures as a chilling reminder of the human cost of pre-trial solitary confinement. His story reveals the constitutional paradox and moral failure at the heart of this practice: Individuals who remain legally innocent are subjected to one of the harshest punishments the state can impose. This practice strips people of their liberty twice over, first through incarceration itself, and again through prolonged isolation that inflicts devastating psychological harm. Despite its severity, the use of solitary confinement against pre-trial detainees remains largely overlooked in legal scholarship and reform, even as it undermines the presumption of innocence, exacerbates systemic …
The Broken Promise Of The Idea: How Delays And Disparities Undermine Special Education Rights, Silvia C. Montiel Morales
The Broken Promise Of The Idea: How Delays And Disparities Undermine Special Education Rights, Silvia C. Montiel Morales
Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) was enacted to guarantee children with disabilities the right to a free appropriate public education. In practice, that promise is too often broken. Students, especially those from low-income families and communities of color, wait months or years for evaluations, attend underfunded schools that lack qualified staff, and face systemic barriers to enforcing their rights. Meanwhile, families with resources can sidestep delays through private testing, attorneys, and advocacy, leaving others behind. This Note examines how systemic delays, underfunding, and inequities in special education services undermine children’s rights under the statute. It argues that these …
Editor's Note
Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice
No abstract provided.
Grown-Ups, Grown-Downs, And Pan-Generationality, In Parents, Children, And The Ripples Of Transitional Justice (Kirsten J. Fisher & Caitlin Mollica Eds., 2026), Mark A. Drumbl
Books and Chapters
Until one becomes a grown-up, one perhaps remains a ‘grown-down’. Indeed, a refrain among concerns that have been raised about demobilization programmes for former child soldiers is that they treat former child soldiers as grown-downs, often even as infants, notwithstanding the experiences of these young people in terms of fighting and foraging and fending and fleecing which, indeed, surpass the kinds of challenges that many grown-ups ever face. In the end, then, as Grace Akello has poignantly demonstrated, many decommissioned child soldiers remain grown-downs who end up going down paths on which they shift from armed conflict to drift into …
The Futility Of “Genocide” In Ending A Genocide, Shannon Fyfe
The Futility Of “Genocide” In Ending A Genocide, Shannon Fyfe
Scholarly Articles
After the horrors of World War II, the Genocide Convention of 1948 sought to invest the international community in creating legal obligations that “sovereign” states commit to preventing and punishing future genocides. Unfortunately, this has not succeeded. International legal jurisprudence pertaining to identifying and punishing genocide has developed at the International Court of Justice and at other international criminal courts and tribunals. Yet the invocation of the term “genocide” in public, academic, or legal discourse has generally failed to ensure the participation of the international community in stopping a genocide. The United States, for instance, has failed to play the …
Heat Camps: Juvenile Curfews, Extreme Heat & The Eighth Amendment, Norrinda Brown
Heat Camps: Juvenile Curfews, Extreme Heat & The Eighth Amendment, Norrinda Brown
Washington and Lee Law Review
For decades, in the summertime, America has confined certain of its youth in what are essentially open-air heat camps. In city after city, camp-form is established through the enactment of warm-weather juvenile curfews which keep the youth at home or in state-sponsored centers during summer nights and, increasingly, during days as well. Local governments justify these curfews with general notions of “public safety,” including to protect the youth they confine. But the laws are not benevolent. Reducing youth mobility by curfew results in exclusion, oversurveillance, and potentially lethal heat punishment of the youth, possibly in violation of the Eighth Amendment. …
The Children’S Lawsuits: Building A Global Movement In Law And Society, Mary Christina Wood
The Children’S Lawsuits: Building A Global Movement In Law And Society, Mary Christina Wood
Washington and Lee Law Review
This essay describes the Atmospheric Trust Litigation (ATL) campaign, spearheaded by Our Children’s Trust, consisting of climate cases brought by youth premised on the public trust principle and, later, on express constitutional rights. The essay characterizes the cases as (1) accomplishing a “rights turn” in environmental law by invoking constitutional claims rather than statutory claims that previously marked almost all environmental litigation; (2) establishing a unified global framework of climate responsibility by depicting the planet’s atmosphere as a global public trust asset which all governments have an obligation to protect; and (3) galvanizing a youth climate movement centered on the …
Child/Youth Climate Litigation: Tracking Children’S Rights And Children’S Impact, Aoife Daly, Liesl Muller
Child/Youth Climate Litigation: Tracking Children’S Rights And Children’S Impact, Aoife Daly, Liesl Muller
Washington and Lee Law Review
Children and youth have been engaging extensively in climate action around the world. They have been doing this by protesting in the streets, talking with governments, and most recently by taking climate litigation against governments and companies. In this Article, these climate cases are considered from a children’s rights perspective. Using the Youth Climate Justice database, fifty cases are analyzed to consider two aspects of climate litigation—the children’s rights involved in the case, and the significance of the outcomes of the cases. It is concluded that climate cases are a new form of child participation in society, and that child …
Masthead
Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice
No abstract provided.
Data Privacy At The Border: How To Balance National Security Concerns And Privacy Interests When Conducting Forensic Border Searches Of Electronic Devices, Eleni Filley
Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice
Do you know where your phone is? Can you describe the last five pictures in your camera roll? How many websites have you visited this month? Cell phones are an extension of our person and contain some of our most private data: location, banking, loved ones, sleep statistics, reproductive information, and more. As our technology develops, so too should our laws. This Note explores the lack of privacy protections at the U.S. border and how susceptible our data is to a government search. A Supreme Court ruling recognizing the unique piece of property a cell phone represents, even at a …
Table Of Contents
Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice
No abstract provided.
Editor's Note
Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice
No abstract provided.
Democracy, History, And Washington And Lee, Christopher B. Seaman
Democracy, History, And Washington And Lee, Christopher B. Seaman
Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice
At Washington and Lee, it is customary for the new holder of an endowed professorship to deliver a public lecture called a chair talk to mark their installation. This is a lightly edited and footnoted version of Professor Seaman's chair talk on October 8, 2024, given as the new Robert E.R. Huntley Professor of Law.
Discretionary (In)Justice Continued: Discretion As A Tool To Deny Asylum, Kate Aschenbrenner Rodriguez
Discretionary (In)Justice Continued: Discretion As A Tool To Deny Asylum, Kate Aschenbrenner Rodriguez
Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice
In 2012, I published an article entitled Discretionary (In)justice: The Exercise of Discretion in Claims for Asylum. At that time, I was concerned because of a pattern I had seen of adjudicators in individual cases denying applications for asylum not on the basis of statutory eligibility but instead in an exercise of the adjudicator’s discretion. Since that time, the administrations of both the former President Trump and the now-current President Biden have used every legal tool available to them, including the exercise of discretion in asylum claims, to make it more difficult to obtain asylum and therefore to discourage …
Cannabis At Work: Navigating The Intersection Of Employment Law And Legalized Marijuana, Eva Lane
Cannabis At Work: Navigating The Intersection Of Employment Law And Legalized Marijuana, Eva Lane
Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice
As states increasingly legalize forms of cannabis use, federal regulation remains stagnant. These outdated laws still hold power, undermining state-granted rights. This impact is especially felt in the employment sector. While states pass laws legalizing cannabis use, employers still have a right to a drug free workplace. Many employment agreements prohibit drug use, even if legal under state law. This Note examines recent caselaw to analyze how courts are handling the battle between state and federal government as it relates to cannabis legalization. Ultimately, the argument highlights the risk employees face – engaging in what they believe is legal behavior …
Life In Limbo: Cryptocurrency And Fosta As The Pillars Of Cyber-Trafficking, Rebecca Liu
Life In Limbo: Cryptocurrency And Fosta As The Pillars Of Cyber-Trafficking, Rebecca Liu
Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice
As the internet continually advances into Web 3.0, human traffickers thrive in using online platforms to prey on their victims, creating a new form of human trafficking: cyber-trafficking. In 2018, Congress passed the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (“FOSTA”) to dampen the stringent protection that 47 U.S.C. § 230 (“Section 230”) offered to internet intermediaries in cyber-trafficking litigation. However, Congress’s intended effect in passing FOSTA failed, as courts continue to interpret FOSTA narrowly, upholding the stringent protection that Section 230 offers internet intermediaries. Beyond FOSTA’s indifferent impact, governmental bodies struggle adapting to Web 3.0’s landscape, neglecting to intervene with traffickers’ …
“Freedom Lives Hence, And Banishment Is Here”: The Weaponization Of Immigration Law To Punish Political Dissidents, Ryan Scott
Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice
This Note explores the long and bipartisan history of the United States government’s weaponization of the immigration system to control, exclude, and expel percieved political enemies. The near-unlimited power that the federal government has acrrued in immigration matters has been used since the Founders’ generation to purge the country of those whose ideas and speech are seen by the powers that be as threatening or subversive. This Note traces the arc of such efforts from the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 to the explusion of activists under President Trump. The Note also examines attempts to force the courts to …