Juvenile Law Commons^™

Family Engagement And Collaborative Decision-Making Processes Provide Multiple Benefits In Child Welfare Cases, Kelly Browe Olson

Law Faculty Scholarship

This article is about the importance of family engagement and collaborative decision making in child welfare cases. It briefly reviews the history of mediation and family group meetings and suggests that juvenile courts and child welfare agencies should thoughtfully prioritize and expand their use of the techniques and processes of interdisciplinary collaborative decision-making and dispute resolution that have been successful for over thirty-five years.

Key Points for the Family Court Community: The use of collaborative decision-making and dispute resolution techniques in child welfare cases provides multiple benefits for the families and professionals involved in these cases; Brief history of the …

There’S Nothing Worse Than Losing To A Girl: An Analysis Of Sex Segregation In American Youth Sports, Julia Konieczny

Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality

No abstract provided.

Addressing The High School Sexual Assault Epidemic: Preventive And Responsive Solutions, Carolyn Haney

Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality

No abstract provided.

Cooperative Federalism And Sijs, Shani M. King, Nicole Silvestri Hall

UF Law Faculty Publications

Recognizing the plight of young immigrants who have suffered abuse, neglect, or abandonment, and cannot be reunited with a parent, Congress has accorded those who qualify Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS). SIJS has created an expedited path for them to permanent residency and, ultimately, citizenship. The statutory scheme Congress crafted is unusual in that it requires each applicant to obtain a state court order finding that they meet the requirements for SIJS before the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service decides whether to confer that status on them. The implementation of this scheme has been fraught with difficulty, representing for …

Families Belong Together: The Path To Family Sanctity In Public Housing, Mckayla Stokes

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

In its 2015 landmark civil rights decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court finally held that the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the United States Constitution guarantee same-sex couples’ marital equality. The Court’s unprecedented declaration that the right to marry is a fundamental right under the Due Process Clause strengthened married couples’ right to privacy because it subjects government actions infringing on marital unions to heightened scrutiny. The Supreme Court has the option to minimize the impact of Obergefell by interpreting the right to marriage very narrowly—as only encompassing the right to enter into a state-recognized union …

The Pursuit Of Comprehensive Education Funding Reform Via Litigation, Lisa Scruggs

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

Panel Discussion: The Right To Education: With Liberty, Justice, And Education For All?

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

Confession Obsession: How To Protect Minors In Interrogations, Cindy Chau

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

No abstract provided.

As Pertains To The Criminal Justice System, Is Hindsight 20/20?, Syndie G. E. Molina, Cristina Negrillo

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

No abstract provided.

The Inconvenience Of Justice: How Unmitigated Official Misconduct Almost Destroyed The Lives Of Five Young Boys From Harlem, Stefania Bordone, David Wright

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

No abstract provided.

The Methodology Of Social Adaptation Following The Liberation Of A Wrongful Conviction, Ashantwa Jackman

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

No abstract provided.

The Law And Policy Of Child Maltreatment, Frank Vandervort

Book Chapters

Each year in the United States some four million children are reported to child protective services and hundreds of thousands of children are confirmed victims of maltreatment. This chapter provides a brief overview of the civil and criminal law’s response to child abuse and neglect. It summarizes the major federal statutes that provide funding to the states to support both civil and criminal law responses to maltreatment. It discusses the division of responsible for responding to child maltreatment between the federal and state governments (federalism). It also provides a summary of the constitutional framework for handling both civil and criminal …

Lessons From Disaster: Assessing The Covid19 Response In Youth Jails & Prisons, Madalyn K. Wasilczuk

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Application Of Mercy: Equal Treatment For All Youth Who Commit Sex Offenses, Jennica Janssen, David Dematteo

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

Unaccompanied Minors, Statutory Interpretation, And Due Process, Shani M. King, Nicole Silvestri Hall

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article proposes a novel statutory argument in favor of finding a categorical right to appointed counsel for unaccompanied minors (UMs) using the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA)’s fair hearing provision as the basis for this right. We provide the historical framework behind the enshrinement of these two rights and then argue that Congress never intended to preclude appointed counsel. We further propose that the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) grants UMs a positive liberty interest,14 and we use this statutory interest as the basis of an original means of surmounting the Lassiter presumption that only a loss of …

In Re Sophia M., 204 A.3d 605 (R.I. 2019, Erin Ferry

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

America's Hidden Foster Care System, Joshua Gupta-Kagan

Faculty Scholarship

In most states, child protection agencies induce parents to transfer physical custody of their children to kinship caregivers by threatening to place the children in foster care and bring them to family court. Both the frequency of these actions (this Article establishes that they occur tens or even hundreds of thousands of times annually) and their impact (they separate parents and children, sometimes permanently) resemble the formal foster care system. But they are hidden from courts, because agencies file no petition alleging abuse or neglect, and hidden from policymakers, because agencies do not generally report these cases.

While informal custody …

Washington’S Young Offenders: O’Dell Demands A Change To Sentencing Guidelines, Erika Vranizan

Seattle University Law Review

This Note argues that the O’Dell decision was a watershed moment for criminal justice reform. It argues that the reasoning in O’Dell should be seized upon by the legislature to take action to remediate instances in which defendants are legal adults but do not possess the cognitive characteristics of an adult sufficient to justify adult punishment. Given both the scientific impossibility of identifying a precise age at which characteristics of youthfulness end and adulthood begins and the Court’s repeated recognition that these very factors impact culpability, the current approach to sentencing young offenders aged eighteen to twenty-five as adults simply …

Enabling The Best Interests Factors, Adrián E. Alvarez

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

For over a century, state courts and other child welfare agencies in the United States have been applying the “best interests of the child standard” to all decision-making concerning children. The standard is also enshrined within the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC)—a treaty that every nation in the world has ratified except the United States. Notwithstanding its widespread adoption in family law, the standard is, with only a few exceptions, noticeably missing from American laws and policies pertaining to children in the immigration system.

There is a rich literature arguing that children should enjoy special …

The Invisible Prison: Pathways And Prevention, Margaret F. Brinig, Marsha Garrison

Journal Articles

In this paper, we propose a new strategy for curbing crime and delinquency and demonstrate the inadequacy of current reform efforts. Our analysis relies on our own, original research involving a large, multi-generational sample of unmarried fathers from a rust-belt region of the United States as well as the conclusions of earlier researchers.

Our own research data are unusual in that they are holistic and multigenerational: The Court-based record system we utilized for data collection provided detailed information on child maltreatment, juvenile status and delinquency charges, child support, parenting time, orders of protection, and residential mobility for focal children (the …