Washington and Lee Law Review Online

The Online Edition is a new online complement to the Washington and Lee Law Review’s print edition. Established in 2014, the Online Edition allows authors to publish commentary on the latest legal issues in real time. The goal of the Online Edition is to foster discussion within the legal community on the most relevant trends in legal scholarship. It provides a platform from which scholars, practitioners, and others can share their research and ideas with the legal community in a timely and focused manner. In addition, the Online Edition provides authors with valuable publication tools. The Online Edition is committed to helping authors achieve high exposure for their work and connecting legal scholars to encourage academic dialogue.

List of Papers (Total 192)

Face Card Declined: The Deepfake Threat to Biometric Security in Financial Systems

Once limited to entertainment and disinformation, deepfakes are now extending into the financial sector, where voice and facial impersonations exploit biometric authentication systems to facilitate fraudulent transactions. This evolution exposes gaps in existing legal and regulatory frameworks, raising critical questions about consumer protection and institutional safeguards...

Saving Private Unfaithful: An Argument for Administrative Separation and Action in Lieu of Criminalizing Extramarital Sexual Conduct

In order to keep America’s armed forces deadly, ESC must be decriminalized. The MCM’s 2019 update to start including non-heterosexual marriages and affairs tragically expands the reach of ESC. This Note presents new data on charging patterns of ESC in the Marines, highlighting the crime’s active use. ESC continues to overcompensate for behavior prejudicial to good order and...

Litigating Vertical Mergers: Innovation Dynamics from Illumina-Grail

Illumina-Grail represents an important moment in antitrust litigation, reshaping the legal landscape for vertical mergers in innovation-driven markets. This Article analyzes the Federal Trade Commission’s uncommon achievement in blocking the Illumina-Grail merger—a ruling sustained by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals—emphasizing its significant ramifications for antitrust...

Generative Artificial Intelligence and Copyright in the Film and Media Industry

The development of generative artificial intelligence (“GAI” or “generative AI”) introduces compelling benefits and capabilities to filmmakers and artists, but also brings complications regarding copyright of creative works. The American film and media industry in particular illustrates the scope of GAI’s legal, economic, and ethical implications. Though GAI may exhibit...

A Jacksonian Theory of Estoppel in IP Litigation Against the United States

As an intellectual property infringer, the federal government occupies a unique position as both the entity that approved the infringed patent or trademark and an entity capable of arguing for its invalidity. By arguing for invalidity, the federal government assumes that it should be exempt from the traditional rules of procedural estoppel. Indeed, the government believes that...

The Fiduciary Duty of Combatting Global Climate Change

Ancient Roman Law codified the concept that there are certain resources that are so great and so important to human survival, that intuitively, no person should own them. Further, the government must protect these resources for the people. Today, this concept is known at the public trust doctrine. According to the contemporary doctrine, the seas, oceans, shores, and submerged...

Unfenced: The Fourth Circuit Gives Geofencing Its First Appellate Go-Ahead in United States v. Chatrie

In United States v. Chatrie, the Fourth Circuit issued the first federal appellate opinion on the Fourth Amendment status of geofencing queries. The opinion is significant because geofences present a conceptual challenge to the framework of Carpenter v. United States, the reigning Supreme Court precedent on the Fourth Amendment status of digital searches. That opinion held that...

ESG, Sustainability Disclosure, and Institutional Investor Stewardship

This Article sheds new light on the link between sustainability disclosure and institutional investors’ stewardship activities aimed at promoting improvements in the ESG performance of investee companies. On the one hand, sustainability disclosure is one of the information elements that may be relevant to institutional investors’ stewardship activities. On the other hand...

Implied Consent in Administrative Adjudication

Article III of the Constitution mandates that judges exercising the federal judicial power receive life tenure and that their pay not be diminished. Nonetheless, certain forms of adjudication have always taken place outside of Article III—in state courts, military tribunals, territorial courts, and administrative tribunals. Administrative law judges, employed by various federal...

“No Superior But God”: History, Post Presidential Immunity, and the Intent of the Framers

This essay is directly responsive to one of the most pressing issues currently before the courts of the United States: the question of whether former Presidents enjoy immunity from criminal prosecution for acts they committed in office. Building upon the recent ruling of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in United States v. Trump, 91 F.4th 1173 (D.C. Cir...

Addressing Mental Disability Head On: The Challenges of Reasonable Accommodation Requests for Virginia Housing Providers

A person’s home should be a sanctuary of safety, security, and comfortability away from the demands of the outside world. Yet for many people living with mental illness, a home can all too easily become a sort of temporary prison. Nowhere is this more apparent than when a housing provider stands in the way of allowing someone with a mental disability the equal opportunity to use...

The Vagueness of the Independent State Legislature Doctrine

The Independent State Legislature (ISL) Theory has been one of the hottest topics in election law, with conservative thinkers championing a strong version of the theory. In Moore v. Harper, the Supreme Court had the opportunity to turn this controversial theory into actual doctrine. The Court, though, declined to adopt a maximalist version of the theory and declined to reject it...

The Wild, Wild West of Laboratory Developed Tests

Since the 1950’s, scientists have built novel technologies to screen for genetic diseases and other biological irregularities. Recently, researchers have developed a method called “liquid biopsy” (as opposed to a standard tissue biopsy) that uses a liquid sample (e.g., blood) to non‑invasively spot biomarkers indicating different types of cancers in the patient’s body. While the...

Title Theft

Real property owners across the country have been targeted by scammers who prepare deeds purporting to convey title to property the scammers do not own. Sometimes, the true owners are entirely unaware of these bogus transfers. In other instances, the scammers use misrepresentation to induce unsophisticated owners to sign documents they do not understand. Property doctrine...

Till the Rivers All Run Dry: Equal Sovereignty and the Western Water Crisis

Across the United States, a countless number of people rely on groundwater for basic necessities such as eating, drinking, agriculture, and energy-creation. At the same time, overuse combined with increasingly dry conditions throughout the country, tied to the increasingly unpredictable and devastating impacts of climate change, threaten this fundamental building block of society...

#MeToo & The Courts: The Impact of Social Movements on Federal Judicial Decisionmaking

In late 2017, the #MeToo movement swept through the United States as individuals from all backgrounds and walks of life revealed their experiences with sexual abuse and sexual harassment. After the #MeToo movement, many scholars, advocates, and policymakers posited that the watershed moment would prompt changes in the ways in which sexual harassment cases were handled. This...

Federal Common Law, Climate Torts, and Preclusion

Municipalities have been trying for decades to hold energy companies accountable for their role in the climate change crisis. In an effort to prevent suits, these companies are pushing the novel legal theory that federal common law provides a basis for jurisdiction in federal court over these claims. Once in federal court, the defendants argue that the very federal common law...

Artificial Intelligence and Transformative Use After Warhol

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith clarifies the scope of transformative use and the role of these uses in the fair use analysis. This important case has implications for a fair use analysis of artificial intelligence. This article evaluates the interaction between copyright law’s fair use doctrine and typical...

Code and Prejudice: Regulating Discriminatory Algorithms

In an era dominated by efficiency-driven technology, algorithms have seamlessly integrated into every facet of daily life, wielding significant influence over decisions that impact individuals and society at large. Algorithms are deliberately portrayed as impartial and automated in order to maintain their legitimacy. However, this illusion crumbles under scrutiny, revealing the...

Grappling with Our Own Errors: Lessons from State v. Blake

After fifty years of a failed war on drugs, many states are just now beginning to take steps toward attempting to repair a half-century of harm. By examining the response of Washington’s government at the executive and legislative levels to the Washington Supreme Court’s decision in State v. Blake, this Note identifies some key factors that must be present in the paths forward...

The Perks of Being Human

The power of artificial intelligence has recently entered the public consciousness, prompting debates over numerous legal issues raised by use of the tool. Among the questions that need to be resolved is whether to grant intellectual property rights to copyrightable works or patentable inventions created by a machine, where there is no human intervention sufficient to grant those...

Exams in the Time of ChatGPT

Invaluable guidance has emerged regarding online teaching in recent years, but less so concerning online and take-home final exams. This article offers various methods to administer such exams while maintaining their integrity—after asking artificial intelligence writing tool ChatGPT for its views on the matter. The sophisticated response of the chatbot, which students can use in...

Silencing Students: How Courts Have Failed to Protect Professional Students’ First Amendment Speech Rights

Over the past two decades, social media has dramatically changed the way people communicate. With the increased popularity of virtual communication, online speech has, in many ways, blurred the boundaries for where and when speech begins and ends. The distinction between on campus and off campus student speech has become particularly murky given the normalization of virtual...

Zooming In: Analyzing Annual Meeting Format Changes Amidst a Global Pandemic

Beginning in March of 2020, public companies in the United States were forced to take unprecedented measures to observe corporate formalities while following the government-mandated health and safety measures resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. Those measures made in-person activities and meetings either incredibly challenging or, in certain jurisdictions, illegal. Because...

The Black Fourth Amendment

Policing Black bodies serves at the forefront of the American policing system. Black bodies are subject to everlasting surveillance through institutions and everyday occurrences. From relaxing in a Starbucks to exercising, Black bodies are deemed criminals, surveilled, profiled, and subjected to perpetual implicit bias when participating in mundane activities. Black people should...