Law Commons^™

Conceptualizing Legal Childhood In The Twenty-First Century, Clare Huntington, Elizabeth S. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

The law governing children is complex, sometimes appearing almost incoherent. The relatively simple framework established in the Progressive Era, in which parents had primary authority over children, subject to limited state oversight, has broken down over the past few decades. Lawmakers started granting children some adult rights and privileges, raising questions about their traditional status as vulnerable, dependent, and legally incompetent beings. As children emerged as legal persons, children’s rights advocates challenged the rationale for parental authority, contending that robust parental rights often harm children. And a wave of punitive reforms in response to juvenile crime in the 1990s undermined …

The American Child Welfare System: The Inconspicuous Vehicle For Social Exclusion, Zachary Auspitz

University of Miami Race & Social Justice Law Review

No abstract provided.

Reforming (But Not Eliminating) The Parental Discipline Defense, Hazel Blum

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Note argues that although states should retain the parental discipline defense, their legislators should rewrite their statutes to limit the defense to a specific range of disciplinary methods that social science research has shown to have either net-beneficial or net-neutral effects on children. Part II explores religious and cultural attitudes about corporal punishment, including an overview of traditional American attitudes toward corporal punishment. Specifically, it explores how religious teachings, including Evangelical Christianity, Methodism, and Judaism, affect attitudes towards parental discipline. Additionally, Part II will examine the build-up to and aftermath of Sweden’s ban on corporal punishment—the first nation worldwide …

Salvaging "Safe Spaces": Toward Model Standards For Lgbtq Youth-Serving Professionals Encountering Law Enforcement, Brendan M. Conner Esq.

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

No abstract provided.

Evolutionary Theory And Kinship Foster Care: An Initial Test Of Two Hypotheses, David J. Herring, Jeffrey J. Shook, Sara Goodkind, Kevin H. Kim

Articles

Public child welfare systems increasingly rely on kin to serve as foster parents. This study tests two hypotheses concerning kinship foster care that have been formulated based on evolutionary theory and behavioral biology research. The first hypothesis is that on average foster children are likely to benefit from higher levels of parental investment and realize better outcomes if placed with kin rather than non-kin foster parents. The second hypothesis is that on average children in kinship foster care placements are likely to benefit from higher levels of parental investment and realize better outcomes if placed with some types of kin …

Rescuing Baby Doe, Mary Crossley

Articles

The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Baby Doe Rules offers a valuable opportunity to reflect on how much has changed during the past two-and-one-half decades and how much has stayed the same, at least in situations when parents and physicians face the birth of an infant who comes into the world with its life in peril.

The most salient changes are the medical advances in the treatment of premature infants and the changes in social attitudes towards and legal protections for people with disabilities. The threshold at which a prematurely delivered infant is considered viable has advanced steadily earlier into pregnancy, …

The Culture Differential In Parental Autonomy, Elaine M. Chiu

Faculty Publications

When the laws of a community reflect a dominant culture and yet many of its members are from other minority cultures, there is often conflict. When this conflict occurs in the legal regulation of the parent-child relationship, the consequences are tremendous for the children, the parents, and the State. This Article focuses on the federal statute criminalizing female genital surgeries, and, in doing so, it makes two major claims. The first claim is that the decisions of minority parents are scrutinized and regulated to a greater degree than the decisions of parents from the dominant culture, even when their decisions …

Court-Ordered Foster Family Care Reform: A Case Study, Michael B. Mushlin

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The authors examine the implications of G. L. v. Zumwalt, a case that resulted in a far-reaching consent decree that mandates specific reforms in policy and practice to be implemented by a public social welfare agency in its delivery of services to foster children and their families.