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.