Law Commons^™

Punishment As Protection, Cynthia Godsoe

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Guidelines For Avoiding Pitfalls When Drafting Juvenile Curfew Laws: A Legal Analysis, Elyse R. Grossman, Kathleen S. Hoke

Faculty Scholarship

Curfew laws seek to provide general protection to youth and adults by restricting the times that children of certain ages are allowed to occupy public places or streets. These laws often contain exemptions for youth accompanied by an adult, responding to an emergency, or traveling to or from school, work, or a religious service, among others. However, the actual language used and exemptions included vary by locality. As a result, courts have reached different results—several courts upheld curfew laws as constitutional, while others overturned these laws. Although not the original reason behind juvenile curfew enactment, several studies have found that …

"And If Your Friends Jumped Off A Bridge, Would You Do It Too?": How Developmental Neuroscience Can Inform Legal Regimes Governing Adolescents, Michael N. Tennison, Amanda C. Pustilnik

Faculty Scholarship

Legal models of adolescent autonomy and responsibility in various domains of law span a spectrum from categorical prohibitions of certain behaviors to recognitions of total adolescent autonomy. The piecemeal approach to the limited decision-making capacity of adolescents lacks an empirical foundation in the differences between adolescent and adult decision-making, leading to counterintuitive and inconsistent legal outcomes. The law limits adolescent autonomy with respect to some decisions that adolescents are perfectly competent to make, and in other areas, the law attributes adult responsibility and imposes adult punishments on adolescents for making decisions that implicate their unique volitional vulnerabilities. As developmental neuroscientists …

The Supreme Court And The Transformation Of Juvenile Sentencing, Elizabeth S. Scott, Thomas Grisso, Marsha Levick, Laurence Steinberg

Faculty Scholarship

In the past decade, the Supreme Court has transformed the constitutional landscape of juvenile crime regulation. In three strongly worded opinions, the Court held that imposing harsh criminal sentences on juvenile offenders violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. In combination, these cases create a special status for juveniles under Eighth Amendment doctrine as a category of offenders whose culpability is mitigated by their youth and immaturity, even for the most serious offenses. The Court also emphasized that juveniles are more likely to reform than adult offenders, and that most should be given a meaningful opportunity to …

An Eighth Amendment Analysis Of Statutes Allowing Or Mandating Transfer Of Juvenile Offenders To Adult Criminal Court In Light Of The Supreme Court's Recent Jurisprudence Recognizing Developmental Neuroscience, Katherine I. Puzone

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Family Law And Nonmarital Families, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Postmarital Family Law: A Legal Structure For Nonmarital Families, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

Family law is based on marriage, but family life increasingly is not. The American family is undergoing a seismic shift, with marriage rates steadily declining and more than four in ten children now born to unmarried parents. Children of unmarried parents fall far behind children of married parents on a variety of metrics, contributing to stark inequality among children. Poverty and related factors explain much of this differential, but new sociological evidence highlights family structure — particularly friction and dislocation between unmarried parents after their relationship ends — as a crucial part of the problem. As the trend toward nonmarital …

Children’S Health In A Legal Framework, Clare Huntington, Elizabeth S. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

The interdisciplinary periodical Future of Children has dedicated an issue to children’s health policy. This contribution to the issue maps the legal landscape influencing policy choices. The authors demonstrate that in the U.S. legal system, parents have robust rights, grounded in the Constitution, to make decisions concerning their children’s health and medical treatment. Following from its commitment to parental rights, the system typically assumes the interests of parents and children are aligned, even when that assumption seems questionable. Thus, for example, parents who would limit their children’s access to health care on the basis of the parents’ religious belief have …

Non-Exclusive Adoption And Child Welfare, Joshua Gupta-Kagan

Faculty Scholarship

This Article proposes that child welfare law permit the non-exclusive adoption of foster children who cannot reunify with their parents — that is, adoption by foster parents without severing children’s legal relationships with their biological parents. Present law imposes a choice: extended family members or other foster parents may adopt foster children exclusively — and terminate the legal relationship between the child and biological parents — or they may become guardians — which preserves parent–child relationships but denies foster parents the legal title of “parent,” even when they are long-term primary caretakers.

Non-exclusive adoption would respect the lived reality of …

The New Permanency, Joshua Gupta-Kagan

Faculty Scholarship

Permanency is a pillar of child welfare law; children generally do better with legally permanent caretakers than in temporary foster care. Historically, when foster children cannot reunify with their parents, states have sought to terminate parental rights and find adoptive families. But recent legal reforms have created a continuum of permanency options, many of which permit ongoing legal relationships with biological parents and do not require termination of biological parents’ rights. Research has demonstrated that such options are as lasting as adoption, and can help more children leave foster care to legally permanent caretakers. This continuum promises to empower families …

Children's Health In A Legal Framework, Elizabeth S. Scott, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

The interdisciplinary periodical Future of Children has dedicated an issue to children’s health policy. This contribution to the issue maps the legal landscape influencing policy choices. The authors demonstrate that in the U.S. legal system, parents have robust rights, grounded in the Constitution, to make decisions concerning their children’s health and medical treatment. Following from its commitment to parental rights, the system typically assumes the interests of parents and children are aligned, even when that assumption seems questionable. Thus, for example, parents who would limit their children’s access to health care on the basis of the parents’ religious belief have …