Law Commons^™

Simon Says Take Three Steps Backwards: The National Conference Of Commissioners On Uniform State Laws Recommendations On Child Representation, Jane M. Spinak

Faculty Scholarship

In considering whether I wanted to submit a response to this conference, I turned back to the Fordham Law Review's Proceedings of the Conference on Ethical Issues in the Legal Representation of Children, now referred to by this conference's participants as Fordham. While the entire volume helped me to formulate this response, I want to begin by acknowledging Linda Elrod's and Ann Haralambie's two responses in Fordham as essential to my decision. In a few short pages they encapsulated the essential message of Fordham: that by the end of the last century, the practice of lawyers for children was to …

Aggravating Youth: Roper V Simmons And Age Discrimination, Elizabeth F. Emens

Faculty Scholarship

In Roper v. Simmons, the Supreme Court confronted a difficult question: Given that being younger than eighteen is merely a proxy for diminished culpability, why not let jurors decide whether youth mitigates the culpability of an individual sixteen- or seventeen-year-old offender? The Court's subtle answer draws on psychological literature about the differences between juveniles and adults, but ultimately depends as much on concerns about the mind of the adult juror as on the distinctive traits of juveniles. Read in its best light, Kennedy's opinion seems to turn on the insight that while age-based classifications are rational – they are a …

Adolescence And The Regulation Of Youth Crime, Elizabeth S. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

I am delighted to be a part of this Symposium on Law and Adolescence. My talk today is about adolescent development and juvenile justice policy. Specifically, I will focus on why a legal regime that is grounded in scientific knowledge about adolescence and the role of criminal activity during this developmental period is better for young offenders and for society than the contemporary policy, which often pays little attention to differences between adolescents and adults.

My talk is based on a book on juvenile justice policy I am currently writing with Larry Steinberg, a developmental psychologist who is a leading …

The Effectiveness Of Juvenile Correctional Facilities: Public Versus Private Management, Patrick J. Bayer, David Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

This paper uses data on juvenile offenders released from correctional facilities in Florida to explore the effects of facility management type (private for-profit, private nonprofit, public state-operated, and public county-operated) on recidivism outcomes and costs. The data provide detailed information on individual characteristics, criminal and correctional histories, judge-assigned restrictiveness levels, and home zip codes — allowing us to control for the nonrandom assignment of individuals to facilities far better than any previous study. Relative to all other management types, for-profit management leads to a statistically significant increase in recidivism, but relative to nonprofit and state-operated facilities, for-profit facilities operate at …

Legal Socialization Of Children And Adolescents, Jeffrey Fagan, Tom Tyler

Faculty Scholarship

Research on children and the law has recently renewed its focus on the development of children's ties to law and legal actors. We identify the developmental process through which these relations develop as legal socialization, a process that unfolds during childhood and adolescence as part of a vector of developmental capital that promotes compliance with the law and cooperation with legal actors. In this paper, we show that ties to the law and perceptions of law and legal actors among children and adolescents change over time and age. We show that neighborhood contexts and experiences with legal actors shape the …

Developmental Incompetence, Due Process, And Juvenile Justice Policy, Elizabeth S. Scott, Thomas Grisso

Faculty Scholarship

In 2003, the Florida District Court of Appeal reversed the murder conviction and life sentence imposed on Lionel Tate, who was twelve years old when he killed his six-year-old neighbor. Since Lionel was reported to be the youngest person in modern times to be sent to prison for life, the case had generated considerable debate, and the decision was appealed on several grounds. What persuaded the appellate court that the conviction could not stand, however, was the trial court's rejection of a petition by Lionel's attorney for an evaluation of his client's competence to assist counsel and to make a …

Complexity Of School-Police Relationships Challenge Special Needs Doctrine, Joshua Gupta-Kagan

Faculty Scholarship

On November 5, 2003, concern regarding suspected drug activity led to a massive police search of Stratford High School in the Berkeley School District, north of Charleston, South Carolina. (See Police, School District Defend Drug Raid, available at http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/South/11/07/school.raid/index.html.) Fourteen police officers assumed strategic positions inside and outside the school. Accompanied by a drug-sniffing clog, officers. Some with guns drawn, secured a school hallway and ordered more than I 00 students to get on their knees and face the wall, handcuffing at least 12 who failed to immediately obey the police orders. Alerted by the clog. police physically searched students, …

The Decline Of The Juvenile Death Penalty: Scientific Evidence Of Evolving Norms, Jeffery Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

Shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Atkins v. Virginia holding that the execution of mentally retarded persons violated the Eighth Amendment, legal scholars, advocates, and journalists began to speculate that the Court would next turn its attention to the question of the execution of persons who were juveniles – below eighteen years of age – at the time they committed homicide. Following the Atkins decision, four Justices expressed the view that the rationale of Atkins also supported the conclusion that execution of juvenile offenders was unconstitutional. A constitutional test of capital punishment for juveniles was inevitable. …

Developmental Trajectories Of Legal Socialization Among Serious Adolescent Offenders, Alex R. Piquero, Jeffery Fagan, Edward P. Mulvey, Laurence Steinberg, Candice Odgers

Faculty Scholarship

Legal socialization is the process through which individuals acquire attitudes and beliefs about the law, legal authorities, and legal institutions. This occurs through individuals' interactions, both personal and vicarious, with police, courts, and other legal actors. To date, most of what is known about legal socialization comes from studies of individual differences among adults in their perceived legitimacy of law and legal institutions, and in their cynicism about the law and its underlying norms. This work shows that adults' attitudes about the legitimacy of law are directly tied to individuals' compliance with the law and cooperation with legal authorities. Despite …

Be Careful What You Wish For: Legal Sanctions And Public Safety Among Adolescent Offenders In Juvenile And Criminal Court, Jeffrey Fagan, Aaron Kupchik, Akiva Liberman

Faculty Scholarship

Three decades of legislative activism have resulted in a broad expansion of states' authority to transfer adolescent offenders from juvenile to criminal (adult) courts. At the same time that legislatures have broadened the range of statutes and lowered the age thresholds for eligibility for transfer, states also have reallocated discretion away from judges and instituted simplified procedures that permit prosecutors to elect whether adolescents are prosecuted and sentenced in juvenile or criminal court. These developments reflect popular and political concerns that relatively lenient or attenuated punishment in juvenile court violates proportionality principles for serious crimes committed by adolescents, and is …

Reappraising T.L.O.'S Special Needs Doctrine In An Era Of School-Law Enforcement Entanglement, Joshua Gupta-Kagan

Faculty Scholarship

This essay presents one doctrinal method for lawyers to defend children accused of criminal charges in juvenile or adult court: attacking the applicability of the nearly twenty-year old case, New Jersey v. T.L.O. to most school searches. T.L.O. established a lower standard for searches of students by school officials, but it explicitly did not decide what standard the government must meet to justify school searches performed by police officers, creating a doctrinal starting point for advocates to raise challenges to searches involving police. More fundamentally, the T.L.O. Court based its decision on the presumption that firm gates separate public school …

Blaming Youth, Elizabeth S. Scott, Laurence Steinberg

Faculty Scholarship

In March of 2001, a fourteen-year-old Florida boy named Lionel Tate was sentenced to life in prison without parole for killing six-year-old Tiffany Eunick during a wrestling match that took place when Lionel was twelve years old. Lionel was convicted of first degree murder on the ground that the killing was the result of aggravated child abuse, a crime that contemplates injury of a child by an adult caretaker. His conviction and sentence have prompted much debate and discussion – about his case and, more generally, about the criminal punishment of young offenders. Although the verdict and Lionel's sentence received …

Punishment, Proportionality, And Jurisdictional Transfer Of Adolescent Offenders: A Test Of The Leniency Gap Hypothesis, Aaron Kupchik, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Akiva Liberman

Faculty Scholarship

In the past two decades, nearly every state has expanded its authority and simplified its procedures to transfer adolescent offenders from juvenile to criminal (adult) courts. As a result, the use of jurisdictional transfer has grown steadily. These developments reflect popular and political concerns that punishment in juvenile courts is too lenient for serious crimes committed by adolescents. Yet there is mixed evidence that expanded transfer authority has produced more certain or severe punishments for adolescents prosecuted in criminal courts. Some empirical studies show that adolescents transferred to criminal court are more likely to be convicted, sentenced to prison, and …

This Will Hurt Me More Than It Hurts You: Social And Legal Consequences Of Criminalizing Delinquency, Jeffrey Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

What happens to adolescents once placed in the criminal justice system and the potential violations of human rights that ensue is the focus of this essay. The pace of change, the severity of the new laws, the potential for unintended negative outcomes, and the empirical reality of adult punishment of juvenile offenders creates new urgency to these questions. Unfortunately, there has been little analysis of the comparative effects of statutes and administrative laws that relocate juvenile offenders to the adult court, and there has been virtually no research on the efficacy, impact and consequences of sentencing juveniles as adults. There …

Policing Guns And Youth Violence, Jeffrey A. Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

To combat the epidemic of youth gun violence in the 1980s and 1990s, law enforcement agencies across the United States adopted a variety of innovative strategies. This article presents case studies of eight cities' efforts to police gun crime. Some cities emphasized police-citizen partnerships to address youth violence, whereas others focused on aggressive enforcement against youth suspected of even minor criminal activity. Still others attempted to change youth behavior through "soft" strategies built on alternatives to arrest. Finally, some cities used a combination of approaches. Key findings discussed in this article include:

• Law enforcement agencies that emphasized police-citizen cooperation benefited …

Measured Interpretation: Introducing The Method Of Correspondence Analysis To Legal Studies, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Harcourt develops and advocates a method to more rigorously measure and evaluate how qualitative “social meaning” variables relate to legal practices and public policies. The method integrates in-depth qualitative interviews with an experimental free associational component, map analysis of the interviews, and a methodology, correspondence analysis, that remains little known in the United States despite its acceptance in other parts of the world. Correspondence analysis, according to Professor Harcourt, is a tool that allows researchers to visually represent the relationship between structures of social meaning and the contexts and practices within which they are embedded. This method opens up …

Adding Value To Families: The Potential Of Model Family Courts, Jane M. Spinak

Faculty Scholarship

The Harlem Community Justice Center (Justice Center) officially opened in July 2000 with all the fanfare of a major civic event. The Chief Judge of the State of New York, Judith Kaye, and the Mayor of the City of New York, Rudolph Guiliani, were keynote speakers, lauding the combined efforts of private administrators and public officials in reopening a deteriorating but magnificent 1892 court building in the center of Harlem. The ceremony began and ended with gospel sung by the Addicts Rehabilitation Center Choir, a musical reflection of one component of the Justice Center's jurisdiction. The new Juvenile Intervention Court …

The Legal Construction Of Adolescence, Elizabeth S. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

American lawmakers have had relatively clear images of childhood and adulthood-images that fit with our conventional notions. Children are innocent beings, who are dependent, vulnerable, and incapable of making competent decisions. Several aspects of the legal regulation of childhood are based on this account. Children are assumed not to be accountable for their choices or for their behavior, an assumption that is reflected in legal policy toward their criminal conduct. They are also assumed to be unable to exercise the rights and privileges that adults enjoy, and thus are not permitted to vote, drive, or make their own medical decisions. …

Punishment Or Treatment For Adolescent Offenders: Therapeutic Integrity And The Paradoxical Effects Of Punishment, Jeffrey A. Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

Throughout much of its history, the American juvenile court maintained a goal of rehabilitation of the individual, and placed custody and punishment as secondary or ancillary goals in the pursuit of "remaking the child's character and lifestyle." To its founders, the development of a separate juvenile court reflected a fundamental distinction between sanctions based on characteristics of the offender, and punishment based on the offense. Juvenile court dispositions were designed to determine why the child was in court, and what could be done to avoid future appearances. Judge Julian Mack's classic statement of the original theory of the juvenile court …

Context And Culpability In Adolescent Crime, Jeffrey A. Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay merges the perspectives of context and decision-making to assess the role of contextual factors in the unfolding of violent events by adolescents. The framework for decision-making assumes that context is a dynamic rather than a static feature of the cognitive landscape. Decisions by adolescents to engage in crime or violence are shaped through interactions with features of their environments, are contingent on responses emanating from that context, and are filtered through the unique lens of adolescence. Rather than assuming discrete and independent components in a decision framework, this Essay assumes that decisions are the product of interactions across …

Foreword, Elizabeth S. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

In November 1998, the interdisciplinary Center for Children, families and the Law at the University of Virginia sponsored a conference on Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice Reform. The conference brought together an extraordinary group of experts from the academic disciplines of law, criminology and psychology. Before an audience made up of researchers, students, policymakers, and practitioners in the field of juvenile justice, these experts analyzed legal policy toward juvenile crime from a variety of disciplinary and methodological perspectives. The articles in this important symposium issue of the Virginia Journal of Social Policy & the Law are based on the papers …

Guns, Youth Violence, And Social Identity In Inner Cities, Jeffrey Fagan, Deanna L. Wilkinson

Faculty Scholarship

While youth violence has always been a critical part of delinquency, the modern epidemic is marked by high rates of gun violence. Adolescents in cities possess and carry guns on a large scale, guns are often at the scene of youth violence, and guns often are used. Guns play a central role in initiating, sustaining, and elevating the epidemic of youth violence. The demand for guns among youth was fueled by an "ecology of danger," comprising street gangs, expanding drug markets with high intrinsic levels of violence, high rates of adult violence and fatalities, and cultural styles of gun possession …

The Evolution Of Adolescence: A Developmental Perspective On Juvenile Justice Reform, Elizabeth S. Scott, Thomas Grisso

Faculty Scholarship

The legal response to juvenile crime is undergoing revolutionary change, and its ultimate shape is uncertain. The traditional juvenile court, grounded in optimism about the potential for rehabilitation of young offenders, has long been the target of criticism, and even its defenders have been forced to acknowledge that it has failed to meet its objectives. Beginning in the late 1960s, when the Supreme Court introduced procedural regularity to delinquency proceedings in In re Gault, courts and legislatures began to slowly chip away at the foundations of the juvenile justice system. Recent developments have accelerated and intensified that process, as …

Preventive Detention And The Judicial Prediction Of Dangerousness For Juveniles: A Natural Experiment, Jeffery Fagan, Martin Guggenheim

Faculty Scholarship

Since 1970, legislatures have increasingly relied on preventive detention – detention before trial ordered solely to prevent an accused from committing crime during the pretrial period – as an instrument of social control. Prior to this period, detention before trial was usually ordered only to assure an accused's presence at trial or to ensure the integrity of the trial process by preventing an accused from tampering with witnesses. Today, the majority of states and the federal system have changed their laws to allow judges to detain arrestees who pose a risk to society if released during the pretrial period. Half …

The Role Of Firearms In Violence "Scripts": The Dynamics Of Gun Events Among Adolescent Males, Deanna L. Wilkinson, Jeffrey Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, the use and deadly consequences of gun violence among adolescents has reached epidemic proportions. At a time when national homicide rates are declining, the increasing rates of firearm deaths among teenagers is especially alarming. Deaths of adolescents due to firearm injuries are disproportionately concentrated among nonwhites, and especially among African-American teenagers and young adults. Only in times of civil war have there been higher within-group homicide rates in the United States. There appears to be a process of self-annihilation among male African-American teens in inner cities that is unprecedented in American history. Unfortunately, few studies have examined …

Minor Changes: Emancipating Children In Modern Times, Carol Sanger, Eleanor Willemsen

Faculty Scholarship

Parents and their teenage children don't always get along. At some time during adolescent development, parents may turn into embarrassments and teenagers into domestic terrorists. For most families this is a phase. Adolescence is endured, the child accomplishes some degree of separation from parents, and the transition to adulthood advances.

In some families, however, the period is more like a siege than a phase. Conflict may last longer and be more strifeful, more intense. If the family is incapable or unwilling to resolve the tensions, an intractability may set in. In these cases, domestic tranquility seems attainable only when the …

Judgment And Reasoning In Adolescent Decisionmaking, Elizabeth S. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

Few people believe that five year olds and fifteen year olds think, act or make decisions in the same way. The question is whether and how the law should respond to developmental differences. Traditionally, childhood and adulthood have been two dichotomous legal categories, demarcated by the age of majority. This conception has been contested in recent years, as has the premise that all minors are incompetent to make decisions and function as legal actors. Fueled by the controversy over adolescent access to abortion, an advocacy movement has emerged that challenges the authority of parents and the state over the lives …

Determinants Of Judicial Waiver Decisions For Violent Juvenile Offenders, Jeffrey Fagan, Elizabeth Piper Deschens

Faculty Scholarship

The selection of jurisdiction for adjudicating juvenile crime today is one of the most controversial debates in crime control policy, reflecting differences in assumptions about the causes of crime and philosophies of jurisprudence and punishment. For adolescent offenders, especially violent youth whose behaviors may pose particular social danger, critics view the traditional goals of the juvenile court and the "best interests of the child" standard as being at odds with public concerns for retribution and incapacitation of criminals. The choice between jurisdictions is a choice between the nominally rehabilitative dispositions of the juvenile court and the explicitly punitive dispositions of …

Cessation Of Family Violence: Deterrence And Dissuasion, Jeffrey Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

Family violence research has only recently begun to investigate desistance. Recent developments in the study of behaviors other than family violence, such as the use of addictive substances, suggest that common processes can be identified in the cessation of disparate behaviors involving diverse populations and occurring in different settings. Desistance is the outcome of processes that begin with aversive experiences leading to a decision to stop. Desistance apparently follows legal sanctions in nearly three spouse abuse cases in four, but the duration of cessation is unknown beyond short study periods. Batterers with shorter, less severe histories have a higher probability …

Children's Preference In Adjudicated Custody Decisions, Elizabeth S. Scott, N. Dickon Reppucci, Mark Aber

Faculty Scholarship

Historically, courts usually paid little attention to the child's wishes in deciding which parent should have custody upon divorce. Today, statutes in many states direct courts to consider the child's preference, often as one among several factors that guide decisionmaking. With some exceptions, the law gives only general guidance and does not specify under what circumstances and to what extent the child's desire should affect the decision. Little is known about how important this factor is, what variables influence the weight accorded the child's preference, or how courts obtain and evaluate evidence about the child's wishes.

This Article began as …