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Full-Text Articles in Law
Promoting Permanency And Human Rights, Lauren Bartlett
Promoting Permanency And Human Rights, Lauren Bartlett
All Faculty Scholarship
An increasing number of children are being cared for exclusively by grandparents or extended family. The majority of these caregivers are raising children outside of the foster care system without a formal legal status. In fact, kinship diversion, placing children whose parents cannot or will not care for them with family or friends outside of the foster care system, is encouraged by state and federal law. Informal kinship caregivers face many obstacles to providing care for children and they are more likely to be unemployed, receive government benefits, and be less educated, as compared with parents raising their own children. …
Keeping It In The Family: Minor Guardianship As Private Child Protection, Deirdre Smith
Keeping It In The Family: Minor Guardianship As Private Child Protection, Deirdre Smith
Faculty Publications
Due to the opioid use epidemic and an overwhelmed public child protection system, minor guardianship is an increasingly important tool for relative caregivers seeking to obtain legal authority regarding the children who come into their care because of a parent’s crisis. Yet minor guardianship originated in colonial law for an entirely different purpose: to protect legal orphans who had inherited property. Today’s guardianship laws are still based on this “orphan model” which does not fit today’s reality. This Article is the first to analyze how these outdated guardianship laws are being used as a form of “private child protection” and …