Law Commons^™

Foster Kids In Limbo: The Effects Of The Interstate Compact On Children In Foster Care, Vivek Sankaran

Articles

Each year, child welfare agencies make over 40,000 requests for home studies to determine whether children in foster care can be placed with parents, relatives, and others living in another state. Each request is governed by the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children (ICPC), a uniform law adopted by every state to coordinate the placement of foster children in other states. Under the ICPC, a child can only be placed in foster care in another state after the receiving state conducts a home study and approves the proposed placement. Despite its good intentions, the ICPC has become unworkable...A study …

Case Closed: Addressing Unmet Legal Needs & Stabilizing Families, Vivek S. Sankaran, Martha L. Raimon

Other Publications

This is the first of two articles that examines the role that advocates for parents and families can play in furthering the well-being and safety of children. This article highlights how the work of multidisciplinary advocacy teams with legal expertise can help prevent children from entering foster care. The next article will discuss emerging parent representation models that expedite the safe reunification of children already in foster care.

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 …

Using Preventive Legal Advocacy To Keep Children From Entering Foster Care, Vivek Sankaran

Articles

Children may unnecessarily enter foster care because their parents are unable to resolve legal issues that affect their safety and well-being in their home.[...] Yet these kinds of legal needs for poor families are rarely met. On average, poor families experience at least one civil legal need per year, but only a small portion of those needs are satisfied. For about every six thousand people in poverty, there exists only one legal aid lawyer. So legal aid programs are forced to reject close to a million cases each year. This lack of legal services threatens the well-being of children[...] who …

In Re Sanders And The Resurrection Of Stanley V. Illinois, Joshua Gupta-Kagan

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay begins by reviewing Stanley v. Illinois, and outlines how that foundational case originally recognized parental rights in foster care cases yet became understood primarily as a private adoption case. Second, it explains how, simultaneously, family courts developed the One-Parent Doctrine and a related doctrine making it difficult to transfer custody of a child from an abusive or neglectful parent in one state to a non-offending parent in another. Both doctrines violate Stanley by allowing the State to take custody of children without ever proving parental unfitness. Cases adopting these doctrines literally ignore Stanley. Third, this Essay …