Law Commons^™

Aggravated Circumstances, Reasonable Efforts, And Asfa, Kathleen Bean

Kathleen Bean

This article seeks to identify circumstances that justify a state’s refusal to provide reasonable efforts to reunite parents with their abused or neglected children. While the article focuses on the “aggravated circumstances” exception to the federal reasonable efforts requirement, it offers an analytical approach useful to any decision-maker charged with protecting the health and safety of an abused or neglected child.

Since 1980, federal legislation has explicitly required states receiving federal foster care dollars to make reasonable efforts to reunite parents with children removed because of abuse or neglect. In 1997, Congress responded to widespread concerns that these efforts were …

Hernandez-Ortiz V. Gonzales: Creating Unsound Rules For Adjudicating Asylum Claims In The Ninth Circuit, Sarah A. Schroeder

Sarah A Schroeder

United States asylum law has developed out of several international agreements to which the United States is a party. More specifically, the United States has incorporated into its domestic legislation the asylum requirements set forth in the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (“Refugee Convention”) and the United Nations Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees (“Refugee Protocol”). The Refugee Convention accords refugee status to people who adequately demonstrate that they have been or will be persecuted on account of their race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. However, over time new …

Myspace Is Also Their Space: Ideas For Keeping Children Safe From Sexual Predators On Social Networking Sites, Susan H. Duncan

Susan Duncan

A growing number of disturbing incidents involving minors as victims of sexual solicitation, assault and even murder have been traced to a fairly new type of Internet communication, social networking sites. These sites, hugely popular with teens, provide unique and largely independent and unsupervised channels of self expression and socialization for children. Yet the sites also present real dangers to today’s youth, the most serious being child victimization by sexual predators. To understand the magnitude of the issue this Article begins by defining what social networks are, explaining how they work and tracing their ever increasing popularity. Millions of users …

Steering Tax On Children’S Tobacco Consumption, Michael Adams

Michael Adams

Careers of smokers almost always start in infancy. Therefore, the tobacco industry is confronted with the economic necessity to turn children into addicted smokers. Present efforts to reduce the smoking rate of children remain without sufficient effect, because they miss to change this incentive. The solution is to tax cigarettes smoked by children. Adequately designed this steering tax causes the industry to prevent children from smoking instead of turning them into addicted smokers.

Water Leadership And The Rights Of Youth To Sustainable Development, Prof. Elizabeth Burleson

Prof. Elizabeth Burleson

Reasonable and equitable use of water can help achieve local, regional, and international peace and security. This Article addresses water security around the world. Lack of safe drinking water and sanitation kills roughly 4500 children a day according to the World Health Organization. Youth have an important role to play as stakeholders with the longest range interests in policy outcomes. We have a shared responsibility to ensure water access and water quality. This Article concludes that clean technology transfer in particular and international cooperation generally can facilitate informed decisions upon which egalitarian agreements can establish sustainable watershed management.

Administrative And Punitive Isolation Of Children In Jails And Prisons: Cruel, Unusual, And Awaiting Condemnation, Ben Kleinman

Ben Kleinman-Green

This article applies our emerging understanding of how children mature into adults to the question of whether it is acceptable to subject children to isolation regimes in jails and prisons just as we do fully developed adults. I hope to shed light on the legal questions raised by the impact isolation has on the development of child inmates.