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Constituting Children's Bodily Integrity, Jessie Hill

Faculty Publications

Children have constitutional rights to bodily integrity. When children are abused by state actors, courts do not hesitate to vindicate those rights. Moreover, in at least some cases, children’s bodily integrity rights protect them within the family, giving them the right to avoid unwanted physical intrusions regardless of their parents’ wishes. Nonetheless, the scope of this right of children vis-à-vis their parents unclear; the extent to which it applies beyond the narrow context of abortion and contraception has been almost entirely unexplored and untheorized. This Article is the first in the legal literature to analyze the constitutional right of minors …