Law Commons^™

Parental Rights Rhetoric Versus Parental Rights Doctrine, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Josh Gupta-Kagan observes that the Restatement of Children and the Law does not transform the law of child abuse and neglect. As he contends, this is neither a feature nor a bug. It is simply the reality of a restatement, which can only nudge, not reform, the law. I agree with Gupta-Kagan that only political will, not the American Law Institute (ALI), can fix the significant problems with the family regulation system. For advocates and scholars — including both of us — who seek structural and doctrinal change, the ALI has principles projects, and there is a broader ecosystem …

Restating The Law In A Child Wellbeing Framework, Elizabeth S. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

The Restatement of Children and the Law is scheduled for formal adoption by the American Law Institute in 2024. When this project was first proposed, it was met with some skepticism, on the view that the regulation of children was not a coherent field of law. But after eight years of work on this Restatement, the Reporters have produced a comprehensive account of the law’s treatment of children and clarified that it is, indeed, an integrated and coherent area of law. Our work has uncovered a deep structure and logic that shapes the legal regulation of children in the family, …

The New Orleans Transformation: Foster Care As A Rare, Time-Limited Intervention, Joshua Gupta-Kagan, Christopher Church, Melissa Carter, Vivek S. Sankaran, Andrew Barclay

Faculty Scholarship

This Article offers an initial evaluation of one reformed child protection system — New Orleans, Louisiana — and describes how a system that dramatically reduces the number of children in foster care might look. This system shows how a major metropolitan area can shrink its daily population of children in foster care to the low double digits, which would correspond to a reduction of the national daily foster care population by about 360,000. This reduction was mostly due to sending children home — usually to the homes from which they were removed — within days or weeks of removal, raising …

Non-Exclusive Adoption And Child Welfare, Joshua Gupta-Kagan

Faculty Scholarship

This Article proposes that child welfare law permit the non-exclusive adoption of foster children who cannot reunify with their parents — that is, adoption by foster parents without severing children’s legal relationships with their biological parents. Present law imposes a choice: extended family members or other foster parents may adopt foster children exclusively — and terminate the legal relationship between the child and biological parents — or they may become guardians — which preserves parent–child relationships but denies foster parents the legal title of “parent,” even when they are long-term primary caretakers.

Non-exclusive adoption would respect the lived reality of …

Procedural Due Process Rights Of Incarcerated Parents In Termination Of Parental Rights Proceedings: A Fifty State Analysis, Philip Genty

Faculty Scholarship

Disruption of families through incarceration of parents has become an increasingly serious problem over the past decade. The prison population has grown dramatically, and for women prisoners the increases in the population are particularly striking. From 1980 through 1990, the number of women incarcerated in state and federal prisons increased from 13,420 to 43,845, an increase of 227 percent. In a single year, from 1988 to 1989, the number of incarcerated women increased by 24.4 percent. In 1990 there were an additional 37,844 women in local jails. For men the prison population increased by 130 percent from 316,401 to 727,398 …