Children and the Law Posts

In Loco Reipublicae

This Article offers a new framework for children in constitutional law, one that elevates children’s rights as developing citizens by recognizing parental duties to respect those citizenship rights.

Tribes, States, and Sovereigns’ Interest in Children

This Article takes opposition to ICWA as an opportunity to scrutinize the nature and permissible scope of political communities’ interests in children. Acknowledging that a community’s and a child’s interests may at times conflict, in turn, makes clear the need to develop tools to identify and manage such conflicts when they occur.

October 2023 Council Meeting Updates

At its meeting on October 19 and 20, 2023, the Council reviewed and discussed Council Drafts of the following projects and approved drafts and portions of drafts as listed.

Are Children’s Rights Enough?

This Article analyzes case law on custody and family separation from a jurisdiction that uses a strong children’s rights approach, the European Court of Human Rights. These cases provide a valuable comparator by which to test whether children’s rights framing changes the way that courts reason about children.

Distinguishing Family Poverty from Child Neglect

This Article identifies a range of changes which would improve the legal system’s ability to distinguish poverty from neglect, by both eradicating long-standing legal rules which confuse poverty and neglect, and establishing more radical rules that would reverse the historical division between neglect cases and anti-poverty financial supports.

Pragmatic Family Law

In many areas, family law has managed to avoid polarization. Instead, states are converging on similar rules and policies, working toward consensus on once-divisive issues. What ties together these widespread but underappreciated patterns of convergence, depolarization, and nonpartisan pluralism? This Article argues that a deep, underlying commonality is a pragmatic method of decision- and policymaking.