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Juvenile Law, Kenneth Hecht

Cal Law Trends and Developments

Review of the 1969 decisions in juvenile law reveals that the courts in California, as elsewhere, have been traumatized by the recent transplant of constitutional due process into the formerly barren soil of the juvenile code. For sixty years, children in most American jurisdictions were hidden from constitutional view. The fiction persisted that they were not tried but treated. If a child carne to the attention of the juvenile court, he did so because his parents had failed to fulfill their function. The court succeeded to their role and, in the name of parens patriae, exercised only the power it …