In Spring 2025, the Washington and Lee Law Review held its Lara D. Gass Symposium, Children and Constitutions in the Anthropocene Era. It consisted of a keynote address by Julia Olson, Co-Executive Director and Chief Legal Counsel of Our Children’s Trust, and three panels: “Children, Climate Change, and State Constitutions”; “The U.S. Constitutions and the Meaning of ‘We the [Young] People’”; and “Youth-Powered Litigation and Global Constitutionalism.” The heavily attended Symposium was a tour-de-force in the field of children’s rights.

As climate chaos mounts, young people around the world are pressing courts to reconceptualize the meaning of liberty, equality, and the public trust from the perspective of the planet’s youngest inhabitants and future generations. We are fortunate to have these scholars’ excellent contribution to the 2025 Lara D. Gass Law Review Symposium, and we thank all of the student editors and participants who made it a tremendous success.

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. As the Anthropocene Era progresses, governments will need to reconsider how to protect their youth from physical harm and heat without putting their humanity at risk.

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 right of present and future generations to inherit a climate system capable of sustaining human life. The essay urges treatment of all youth climate cases as part of one coherent field deriving from the shared foundation of government public trust obligation. This unifying theme draws together emerging jurisprudence in a way that coalesces rather than dissipates its planetary reverberations.

Children’s climate litigation has emerged as a powerful tool to address the climate crisis, with young plaintiffs around the world taking governments and corporations to court to demand climate action. This Article examines successful cases—those in which relief sought by the applicants was fully or partially granted—across five continents, providing an “around the world” perspective on the evolution and impact of youth-led climate litigation. Focusing on landmark cases in Australia, Colombia, South Africa, South Korea, and the United States, this analysis highlights the arguments presented by young plaintiffs and the judicial reasoning that supported the relief granted. Through a comparative lens, the Article explores commonalities and differences in legal strategies and the framing of children’s rights and intergenerational justice. In particular, it compares the remedies ordered by courts, assessing the effectiveness of children’s climate litigation strategies. By showcasing these successes, the Article underscores the transformative potential of children’s climate litigation to advance legal protections for present and future generations, while also drawing lessons to inform future advocacy and judicial engagement on climate change.

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 participation has moved from (1) being something primarily aimed at benefiting children to (2) a phenomenon that can benefit the human rights of all.

In today’s post-Dobbs world, states may freely define fetal “persons” and those fundamental rights afforded to them, but not without consequence. The Supreme Court of Alabama’s groundbreaking decision in LePage v. Center for Reproductive Medicine, P.C., holding that frozen embryos are “children” under the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, led fertility clinics and services across the state to close. These in vitro fertilization (IVF) providers feared liability exposure because their standard practices—including embryonic fertilization, testing, cryopreservation, and transfer—inevitably result in damage or death to embryos. The Alabama Legislature swiftly responded by enacting a law granting broad civil and criminal immunity to individuals or entities for death or damage to embryos related to IVF. However, this immunity scheme unconstitutionally deprives extrauterine embryos, now recognized as “persons” under the law, of their right to life at the state and federal level.

This Note explores the fetal personhood landscape as it relates to IVF, focusing on Alabama’s constitutional dilemma. It evaluates the novel due process and equal protection concerns inherent in a state recognizing extrauterine embryonic personhood while conferring immunity for death or damage to embryos. Ultimately, this Note compares three legislative proposals, rooted in alternative state approaches, for Alabama to simultaneously retain fetal personhood and access to IVF. It concludes that excluding extrauterine embryos from all relevant terms of personhood under the law is the only way to ensure constitutional compliance and protect IVF.

Between 2013 and 2023, private-equity-sponsored investment funds spent one trillion dollars on healthcare acquisitions, targeting hospitals, physician practices, and specialty providers. This Note examines the growing role of private equity in the US healthcare system and its implications for cost, quality, and competition.

ring struggling hospitals and medical practices much-needed capital and managerial expertise. In practice, however, prevalent private equity practices often create moral hazards by prioritizing short-term financial gains over long-term community health. Their reliance on debt, short investment horizons, and consolidation strategies can translate into higher prices, compromised care, and anticompetitive behavior. Mounting empirical studies reinforce these concerns, linking private equity ownership to higher costs and increased hospital-acquired adverse events.

This Note situates private equity’s rise in healthcare within the broader story of financialization and analyzes how existing legal frameworks, particularly antitrust law, struggle to address its consequences. It reviews emerging state and federal legislative responses, as well as the Federal Trade Commission’s evolving enforcement strategies, highlighting both opportunities and limitations.

Ultimately, the Note argues that lack of transparency is the greatest obstacle to effective antitrust enforcement of private equity activity in healthcare and proposes robust premerger notification programs targeting private equity sponsors as a politically viable and legally effective first step toward aligning healthcare finance with the public interest. These programs would provide regulators with the tools needed to identify harmful transactions earlier, deter practices that undermine healthcare access and quality, and help ensure that patient care, rather than financial engineering, remains at the center of American healthcare.

In 2014, when the Supreme Court ruled in Riley v. California that police must get a warrant before conducting a search of a cell phone, Chief Justice John Roberts described comparing a search of data on a cell phone to a search of other physical items as “like saying a ride on horseback is materially indistinguishable from a flight to the moon.” A decade later, an overwhelming majority of Americans carry cell phones that contain an ever-expanding set of data showing their habits, routines, and the minutiae of their everyday lives, offering a potential wealth of information to law enforcement conducting criminal investigations.

This information can be accessed through data extraction, whereby forensic tools are used to retrieve a copy of all data stored on a cell phone, including data not easily accessible to the user themselves. Courts are increasingly recognizing that, because of the breadth of potential information easily available from cell phones, warrants to search such devices need to be more limited in scope. Searches based upon the consent exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement are, however, frequently the means used to obtain the same, or greater, access to cell phones as a court might grant through a warrant. Consent searches of cell phones and the data they contain have yet to be subject to either the judicial or scholarly examination they deserve.

This Article is the first to identify and provide an in-depth examination of the issues presented by consent searches of cell phones in the data extraction age. These issues involve questions relating to the scope of consent and how and when the data from cell phone extractions is accessed and analyzed. This Article ultimately argues that in a world where the landscape of technology and data storage is continually and rapidly evolving, making it impossible for the average cell phone user to know all the information that can be obtained from their device via data extraction, truly voluntary consent to cell phone searches is impossible. Accordingly, consent searches of cell phones utilizing extraction technology should no longer be permitted under the Fourth Amendment.

Crowdfunded companies are legally bound to provide investors with an annual report—but most don’t. This “ghosting of the crowd” violates federal securities laws and raises the risk of opportunism by entrepreneurs, who are more prone to misbehave if no one is watching. Most ominously, it threatens the very viability of the investment crowdfunding market, as investors who are ghosted by one company are less likely to invest in another.

This Article reports on the embarrassing record of noncompliance with the annual report rule imposed by the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (“JOBS”) Act of 2012 and Regulation Crowdfunding, and proposes a simple solution: Crowdfunding platforms should withhold one percent of the capital raised by an issuer and only release it once the company files its first annual report. Due to competitive pressure, however, any given crowdfunding platform is unlikely to impose such a rule on its own; Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) action is needed. This Article accordingly concludes with a proposed regulation readymade for the SEC to adopt.

Tens of thousands of children, including disproportionate numbers of Black children, are hit in school every year. More than 50 percent of these students live in the Fifth Circuit states of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. Decades of government data, including the Department of Education’s most recent reports, reveal that Black students receive alarmingly inequitable rates of corporal punishment, demonstrating this education practice to be a legal form of institutionalized racism.

This Article uniquely focuses on the archaic discipline practice’s effects on Black students in Fifth Circuit states. Fifth Circuit law addressing students’ rights in corporal punishment cases has developed into a constitutional wasteland. This creates a perfect storm for children, and particularly Black children, who live in a region where, statistically, they are the most likely to receive physical school punishment and the least likely to receive constitutional protection or any post-punishment relief when excessive abuse results in injuries. The court has taken the isolated position that students are not entitled to constitutional protection for excessive physical discipline if they can pursue alternative remedies in state court—an endeavor that usually fails due to layers of protective shields afforded to schools and educators under state laws. Fifth Circuit jurisprudence misconstrues Supreme Court precedent and sharply deviates from the nine other circuit courts that have found that excessive corporal punishment can violate children’s constitutional rights.

It is time for the United States Supreme Court and Congress to catch up with the rest of the industrialized world. It is time to follow the recommendations of virtually every major medical, psychological, educational, and child advocacy group to recognize a child’s basic human rights—most fundamentally, the right to go to school without fear of being hit. It is time to repudiate this harsh discipline practice administered to children based largely on their skin color and where they live. The future will not look kindly on this practice. We have a responsibility to abandon fidelity to outdated judicial decisions and antiquated laws. We must treat children according to the principles of “liberty and justice for all” they are taught to recite in school.