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The Child-Welfare System And The Limits Of Determinacy, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

To read Robert Mnookin’s seminal 1975 article, Child-Custody Adjudication: Judicial Functions in the Face of Indeterminacy, is to see a blueprint for legislative action. To a remarkable degree, the reforms Mnookin proposed to the child-welfare system are what Congress and the states adopted in the following two decades. And yet reading Mnookin’s article is also a Groundhog Day experience. The problems he described with the child-welfare system nearly forty years ago sound all too familiar today.

Mnookin famously argued that the best-interests standard was indeterminate in the context of the child-welfare system. According to Mnookin, this open-ended standard created …