Law Review Symposium to Explore Children’s Rights and Climate The March 7 event will explore youth-powered movements to address the impacts of climate change.

By Law Communications
February 24, 2025

On Friday, March 7, the Washington and Lee Law Review will host the annual Lara D. Gass Symposium. The event will be held in the Millhiser Moot Court Room, Sydney Lewis Hall, on the W&L campus.

This year’s symposium is titled “Children and Constitutions in the Anthropocene Era” and will explore youth-powered movements to address the impacts of climate change. The keynote speaker for the event is Julia Olson, Co-Executive Director and Chief Legal Counsel of Our Children’s Trust, a non-profit public interest law firm that provides legal services to youth from diverse backgrounds to secure their legal rights to a safe climate.

Led by Catherine Smith, Vincent L. Bradford Professor of Law at W&L, this symposium will bring together scholars, lawyers, and activists to analyze the youth-powered movement demanding a paradigmatic shift in the adult-centered doctrines that ushered in the Anthropocene Era, a unit of geologic time used to describe the most recent period in Earth’s history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems.

Topics during the symposium include climate change’s unique effect on children, especially children who are members of more vulnerable populations, such as racially oppressed groups, indigenous communities, living at sea level; how youth-focused constitutional litigation differs from adult-focused litigation; how a youth-based (and future generations) lens forces constitutional doctrines across the globe to evolve; and the procedural and substantive hurdles in not-so-youth-friendly jurisdictions.

The symposium will include three panels, organized around the following topics: Children, Climate Change, and State Constitutions; The U.S. Constitution and the Meaning of “We the [Young] People;” and Youth-Powered Litigation and Global Constitutionalism. A list of participants and schedule is available online at the W&L Law Review website.

For questions regarding the event, contact Martin Flores at mflores@law.wlu.edu.

The Lara D. Gass Symposium is named in honor of Lara Gass, a member of the Law Class of 2014 who passed away in an automobile accident in March of 2014. Gass served as Symposium Editor for the Washington and Lee Law Review, organizing the Law Review’s 2014 symposium focused on the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Lara was active within the Women Law Students Organization and also served as a Kirgis Fellow, the law school’s peer mentoring group, during the 2012–2013 academic year. In January 2014, Lara received recognition for her academic achievements, her leadership abilities, her service to the law school and university community, and her character when she was inducted into Omicron Delta Kappa, the National Leadership Honor Society.