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America's Hidden Foster Care System, Joshua Gupta-Kagan
America's Hidden Foster Care System, Joshua Gupta-Kagan
Faculty Scholarship
In most states, child protection agencies induce parents to transfer physical custody of their children to kinship caregivers by threatening to place the children in foster care and bring them to family court. Both the frequency of these actions (this Article establishes that they occur tens or even hundreds of thousands of times annually) and their impact (they separate parents and children, sometimes permanently) resemble the formal foster care system. But they are hidden from courts, because agencies file no petition alleging abuse or neglect, and hidden from policymakers, because agencies do not generally report these cases.
While informal custody …
Beyond Law Enforcement: Camreta V. Greene, Child Protection Investigations, And The Need To Reform The Fourth Amendment Special Needs Doctrine, Joshua Gupta-Kagan
Beyond Law Enforcement: Camreta V. Greene, Child Protection Investigations, And The Need To Reform The Fourth Amendment Special Needs Doctrine, Joshua Gupta-Kagan
Faculty Scholarship
The Fourth Amendment “special needs” doctrine distinguishes between searches and seizures that serve the “normal need for law enforcement” and those that serve some other special need, excusing non-law-enforcement searches and seizures from the warrant and probable cause requirements. The United States Supreme Court has never justified drawing this bright line exclusively around law enforcement searches and seizures but not around those that threaten important noncriminal constitutional rights.
Child protection investigations illustrate the problem: millions of times each year, state child protection authorities search families' homes and seize children for interviews about alleged maltreatment. Only a minority of these investigations …