Children and the Law Posts

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.

The article identifies a systemic policy failure, where lawmakers have fallen behind the private sector in understanding and incorporating scientific findings on children’s unique attributes, needs and vulnerabilities into policies that regulate these technologies.

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.

This Article explores the unnecessary termination of a child’s relationship with their parent from an empirical, clinical, and constitutional lens.

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.

This Article presents findings from a systematic examination of the inclusion of parental disability in state termination of parental rights laws.

The University of Chicago Law School is hosting the ‘2023 Law Review Symposium: Children and the Law,’ on the Restatement of the Law, Children and the Law project.

The chapter explores how courts have addressed complex questions about family relations as emerging technologies and shifting social norms have altered what family structures look like across the globe.

In Woodson v. Commonwealth, 871 S.E.2d 653 (Va. Ct. App. 2022), the Court of Appeals of Virginia cited Restatement of the Law, Children and the Law § 3.24 (Tentative Draft No. 1, 2018).