Legal History Commons^™

Stanley V. Illinois'S Untold Story, Joshua Gupta-Kagan

Faculty Scholarship

Stanley v. Illinois is one of the Supreme Court’s more curious landmark cases. The holding is well known: the Due Process Clause both prohibits states from removing children from the care of unwed fathers simply because they are not married and requires states to provide all parents with a hearing on their fitness. By recognizing strong due process protections for parents’ rights, Stanley reaffirmed Lochner-era cases that had been in doubt and formed the foundation of modern constitutional family law. But Peter Stanley never raised due process arguments, so it has long been unclear how the Court reached this …

The Strange Life Of Stanley V. Illinois: A Case Study In Parent Representation And Law Reform, Joshua Gupta-Kagan

Faculty Scholarship

This Article helps describe the growth of parent representation through an analysis of Stanley v. Illinois — the foundational Supreme Court case that established parental fitness as the constitutional lynchpin of any child protection case. The Article begins with Stanley’s trial court litigation, which illustrates the importance of vigorous parental representation and an effort by the court to prevent Stanley from obtaining an attorney. It proceeds to analyze how family courts applied it (or not) in the years following the Supreme Court’s decision and what factors have led to a recent resurgence of Stanley’s fitness focus.

Despite Stanley …

Juvenile Justice In Global Perspective: From Chicago To Shanghai And Back To First Principles, David S. Tanenhaus

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

‘Let’S Change The Law’: Arkansas And The Puzzle Of Juvenile Justice Reform In The 1990s, David S. Tanenhaus, Eric C. Nystrom

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Marital Supremacy And The Constitution Of The Nonmarital Family, Serena Mayeri

All Faculty Scholarship

Despite a transformative half century of social change, marital status still matters. The marriage equality movement has drawn attention to the many benefits conferred in law by marriage at a time when the “marriage gap” between affluent and poor Americans widens and rates of nonmarital childbearing soar. This Essay explores the contested history of marital supremacy—the legal privileging of marriage—through the lens of the “illegitimacy” cases of the 1960s and 1970s. Often remembered as a triumph for nonmarital families, these decisions defined the constitutional harm of illegitimacy classifications as the unjust punishment of innocent children for the “sins” of their …

Save Our Children: Overcoming The Narrative That Gays And Lesbians Are Harmful To Children, 21 Duke J. Gender L. & Pol'y 125 (2013), Anthony Niedwiecki

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

This paper focuses on how gay rights activists had no real choice but to use the court system to advance marriage rights for same-sex couples because they were unable to use the political process to effectively rebut the claim that gays and lesbians were harmful to children. Part I begins with an overview of the ways in which the initiative process has been used to limit gay rights and prevent marriage equality. It then details how, in contrast to the political process, courts have been more receptive to advancing marriage rights for same-sex couples. Part II details Walter Fisher's narrative …

Gender And Nation-Building: Family Law As Legal Architecture Symposium - Nation Building: A Legal Architecture: Articles And Essays, Tracy E. Higgins, Rachel P. Fink

Faculty Scholarship

Although the discipline of family law in the western legal tradition transcends the public/private law boundary in many ways, it is the argument of this Essay that family law, in the private law sense of defining the rights and obligations of members of a family, forms an important part of the legal architecture of nation-building in at least three ways. First, access to the resources of the nation-state devolves through biologically and culturally gendered national boundaries, both reflecting and reinforcing the differential status of men and women in the sphere of the family. Second, the social institution of the family …

Toward A History Of Children As Witnesses, David S. Tanenhaus, William Bush

Scholarly Works

This brief essay offers a selective overview of recent trends in the historical scholarship on American childhood from the origins of the American Revolution to the early years of the Cold War. This overview of the literature has two purposes. First, it highlights recent socio-cultural scholarship that presents substantive challenges to the conventional ways of understanding the history of children and the law. Second, in so doing, it points out that legal histories concerned solely with doctrinal matters can, and often do, present a limited and distorted window into the past. Instead, the essay argues that the place of children, …

Between Dependency And Liberty: The Conundrum Of Children’S Rights In The Gilded Age, David S. Tanenhaus

Scholarly Works

Although legal scholars often assume that the history of children's rights in the United States did not begin until the mid twentieth century, this essay argues that a sophisticated conception of children's rights existed a century earlier, and analyzes how lawmakers articulated it through their attempts to define the rights of dependent children. How to handle their cases raised fundamental questions about whether children were autonomous beings or the property of either their parents and/or the state. And, if the latter, what were the limits of parental authority and/or the power of the state acting as a parent? By investigating …

Book Review, David S. Tanenhaus

Scholarly Works

This concise book explores the origins and early history of the Cook County Juvenile Court, the world’s first such court. The court, which opened on July 3, 1899, in Chicago, reflected its founders’ profound faith both in science to solve social problems and the power of the state to provide for the best interests of its children. Yet, as Getis argues, the juvenile court did not live up to its initial promise, and “instead of a place of experimentation and reform—which it could have been—or a place of individualized justice guided by science—perhaps an unattainable goal—the court became an institution …

“Owing To The Extreme Youth Of The Accused”: The Changing Legal Response To Juvenile Homicide, David S. Tanenhaus, Steven A. Drizin

Scholarly Works

In this essay, the authors seek to dispel the myth that the juvenile court was never intended to deal with serious and violent offenders; a myth that has largely been unchallenged, especially in the mainstream media, and one that critics of the juvenile court have used to undermine its legitimacy. The discovery of homicide data from the Chicago police department from the early twentieth century, the era in which modern juvenile justice came of age, provides us with new historical date with which to put this dangerous myth to rest, by showing that the nation’s model juvenile court—the Cook County …

Growing Up Dependent: Family Preservation In Early Twentieth-Century Chicago, David S. Tanenhaus

Scholarly Works

Beginning in 1911 with Illinois’ passage of the Funds to Parents Act—the first statewide mothers’ pensions legislation—the Chicago Juvenile Court built a two-track system for dependency cases that used the gender of single parents to track their children. The first or “institutional” track followed a nineteenth century model of family preservation that poor families had relied upon since before the Civil War, in which parents had used institutions to provide short-term care for their children during hard times. The juvenile court also established a “home-based” track for dependency that reflected a new model of family preservation. Progressive child-savers denounced the …

Not So Hard (And Not So Special), After All: Comments On Zimring's "The Hardest Of The Hard Cases", Stephen J. Morse

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.