Conference on Representing Children in Families: Children's Advocacy and Justice Ten Years After Fordham

Abstract

The William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, hosted a working conference, Representing Children in Families: Children's Advocacy and Justice Ten Years After Fordham, on January 11-14, 2006. The conference was a follow-up to the Conference on Ethical Issues in the Legal Representation of Children held at Fordham University School of Law in December 1995, which produced the influential Recommendations of the Conference on Ethical Issues in the Legal Representation of Children. The UNLV conference brought together nearly 100 academics and child and youth advocates, mostly, but not exclusively, law-trained, and all with varied experiences relevant to the legal representation of children across a wide array of legal contexts. The conference cast a critical eye on the practice and effects of legal representation of children, producing recommendations, written working group reports and papers regarding the role of family and community in the representation of children. This work product also addressed relationships between children's advocacy and justice, international legal norms, interdisciplinary competencies and models for representation, and the roles of race, ethnicity, class, gender, culture, sexuality, sexual orientation and sexual identity in child advocacy. The conference recommendations and reports, along with the fourteen opening papers and sixteen response papers, are published in 6 Nevada Law Journal 571-1423 (2006). The volume's table of contents, Foreword (by Bruce Green and Annette Appell), Recommendations, and Working Group Reports are available on the conference website; the table of contents is also available on SSRN through a link to this abstract.

The Representing Children in Families Conference planning committee included Professors Annette Appell, Susan Brooks, Bernardine Dohrn, Bruce Green, Marty Guggenheim, and Jean Koh Peters. Opening paper authors are: Annette Appell, Susan Brooks, Bernardine Dohrn, Barbara Fedders, Martin Guggenheim, Kristin Henning, Antoinette Kavanaugh, Nesheba Kittling, Kimberly Mutcherson, Jean Koh Peters, Michael Pinard, Abbe Smith, Kim Taylor-Thompson and David Thronson. Response paper authors are: Marty Beyer, Kim Brooks, Naomi Cahn, Don Duquette, Chris Gottlieb, Gerard Glynn, Ann Haralambie, Robert Harris, Kathy Krebs, Miriam Krinsky and Jennifer Rodriguez, Kate Kruse, Kelly Olsen, Erik Pitchal, Catherine J. Ross, Shari Shink and Jane Spinak.

Keywords: Family, Children, Human Rights, Inequality, Discrimination, Law and Society, Legal Ethics, Gender