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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.

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

Abstract:
This essay begins an exploration of the opposition between, and intersection of, children's rights and civil rights. Although children's rights are sometimes placed under the umbrella of the civil rights movement, many children's rights do not seem to share the essential components of civil rights. Whereas children's rights to equal protection in education, protections against arbitrary state action, and limited freedom of speech and reproductive control, are tied to civil rights historically and conceptually, many other children's rights, such as the right to protection, support and continuity in a caregiver, arise out of the child protection strain of parens patriae doctrine, a tradition essentially aimed at social control, rather than tolerance or liberation, of non-dominant populations and, of course, women. The children's rights movement thus has aspects that are liberating or empowering but also, I hypothesize, aspects that derive from and even reinforce conditions and rhetoric that undermine liberty. Moreover, these non-liberatory aspects of the children's rights movement (dependency rights) may undermine the civil rights of adults.

In this essay, I explore these various faces of children's rights in the context of the Indian Child Welfare Act, a statute that is frequently the location of contests between children's civil and dependency rights and between children's rights and adult civil rights. Although both strands of the children's rights movement may overlap and the notions of civil rights and dependency are present in each, these two strands have distinct histories and purposes that are at odds with each other. The protective strand is rooted in challenges to, and continues to threaten, what we now consider to be the fundamental civil rights of poor families, especially families of color. The civil rights strand is rooted in opposition to race-based or coercive state intervention in private ordering and civic participation, including the creation and maintenance of family relationships.

This essay explores the distinctions between children's dependency rights and civil rights. It first rehearses the role and primacy of parental rights as civil rights in a liberal republican democracy, illustrating the point with the government's historic, value-based disruption of Native American families and culture. The next section offers a preliminary taxonomy of children's rights, dividing them between quasi-civil rights and dependency rights. That section explains how children's dependency and civil rights diverge and conflict. The final section draws distinctions between children's dependency and civil rights as vehicles for liberation and cautions against reflexive extensions of dependency rights under rubrics of liberty and justice.

Children's rights, civil rights, family, Native American

Abstract:
This paper traces the intersecting and diverging paths of adoption norms and the legal recognition of same sex parents. It compares adoption law's trajectory from replicating the modern family and erasing biological connection to its current embrace of biology with a similar movement among lesbian and gay families. While many of these postmodern families are replicating modern family forms, they are also heeding lessons learned in adoption about the endurance of biology, acknowledging and even embracing their children's biological families. The paper first reveals the tenacity of biological connection and its deep and wide significance in United States culture, history, and law. The next section explores lesbian and gay families with children, noting ways these families reflect heteronormativity through two, rather than plural, parent families and yet still value and honor biological connections by including reproductive partners, such as sperm donors and surrogates, into their family systems. The article concludes with lessons open-adoption law and practice might offer lesbian and gay families with children, particularly regarding the possible benefits of developing legal schemes regarding these family systems.

adoption, children, lesbian, gay, family

Abstract:
Children are an essential but often overlooked bounty in the regulation of race, culture, and rights. This oversight is surprising given that children are both primary receivers and transmitters of race, ethnicity, culture, language, and values; and that the constitutional civil right to family autonomy recognizes the importance of children in the creation and perpetuation of moral values and, ultimately, to a diverse and critical polity.

In light of the important social and political roles of children, the power of mothers to be recognized as mothers is crucial not only for hedonic and creative purposes but for the very perpetuation of culture. Nevertheless, we have in this country a long and continuing history of constructing the ideal of "mother" according to skin color, religion, culture, national origin, language, ethnicity, class, and marital status. Families headed by mothers who do not meet these norms are most vulnerable to coercive state intervention and regulation through the child welfare system. This intervention is in practice - and in theory - state-oriented, normative, and often punitive. Women who are compliant, English-speaking, not ethnically diverse, White, and middle class are most successful in the child welfare system; those who diverge from these norms are most likely to lose their motherhood.

This Article illustrates an intersection of Latino families with the child welfare system and highlights the importance and vulnerability of language in this system. The article first rehearses the history and role of the child welfare system in the battle for racial, cultural, and political supremacy in this country. The article next discusses how this struggle relates to Latino families, illuminating the struggle through a brief case study of Maria, a Spanish-speaking grandmother of a child involved in the child welfare system in Las Vegas, Nevada, where approximately a quarter of the population is Latino. The article concludes with some lessons the case study illustrates about the child welfare system.

civil rights, race, latino, gender, family, norms, children

Abstract:
This paper was one of the opening papers for a working conference at William S. Boyd School of Law, UNLV, in January 2006, "Representing Children in Families: Children's Advocacy & Justice Ten Years After Fordham." The conference was a reflection on and continuation of the Conference on Ethical Issues in the Legal Representation of Children. This paper introduces the project and establishes a framework for the exploration of the relationships between children's advocacy and justice. The paper is built on two premises: children's lawyers want to help children; and the natural dominance and myopia of lawyers is exacerbated when representing children in ways that can easily mask children's disparate identities and needs. The paper asserts that because children are not able to direct their lawyers as forcefully or coherently as adults, lawyers for children should exercise extra care and strategies to ascertain children's needs and wishes, such as viewing children through multiple lenses (not just "developmental" and legal) and engaging children's families and communities in our work. The paper presents three conceptual approaches for child advocacy and justice: procedural, legal and social. It then explores a manner of advocacy that might amplify the voice of children (and families and communities) both in legal proceedings to which children are parties and in defining justice.

children, families, lawyering, justice, advocacy, community, bias

Abstract:
This essay reviews Randall Kennedy's Interracial Intimacies (2003), a book that explores African American-white interracial adult-adult relationships and African American- and Native American-white adult-child relationships. For Kennedy, such relationships reflect and promote racial liberty or justice. The paper praises the book for highlighting the arbitrariness and destructiveness of racial classifications, but criticizes it for cloaking in terms of racial liberty what is essentially a conservative narrative about race and poverty that limits socioeconomic and racial mobility. The essay explores how the book fails to take into account fallacies of race neutrality and important distinctions between youth and adults, private and public family law systems, men and women, and adoptive and birth families. The essay first outlines the content and structure of the book and then explores the larger contexts the book ignores. Paying particular attention to Kennedy's portrayal of transracial adoption, the paper shows how his depiction and promotion of such adoption fails to account for the needs and experiences of children, masks institutional racism in, and affecting, the child welfare system, and reflects a white supremacist, patriarchal social agenda that seeks to limit the ability of poor women of color to bear and raise children.

race, gender, adoption, family

Abstract:
This article sets forth some critical observations about the role of children's attorneys in reinforcing and challenging sociolegal norms, particularly those norms that are not child-driven or child-centered. More concretely, it critically explores the role of children's lawyers in promoting the individual and systemic interests of their youthful constituents, most of whom receive lawyers because they are caught in systems that predominately serve poor children and children of color. The article first reflects on the indeterminacy and contingency of the category of children, checking our natural tendencies to idealize children and childhood. The second section describes the children's bar, examining its legalistic approach to children's problems and their solutions, which contemplate children in isolation from their families and communities. The third section notes the decline in children's well-being, despite the growth of a children's bar, and sketches five thematic observations that might account for this anomaly and raise questions regarding the utility of children's lawyers and the roles that they might occupy. These observations relate to the multiple gulfs between children and attorneys, and the limitations of rights-based advocacy, particularly for clients who do not have the authority to define justice in their own terms. The final section explores how children's attorneys are beginning to critically assess their dominance and their approaches to the legal representation of children, and to develop methods to ensure that the child's viewpoint is expressed.

children, family, justice, race, lawyers, norms

Abstract:
Using age as a category of analysis, this article explores the socio-legal category of childhood as part of a larger project aimed at identifying more critical conceptions of justice for children, and ultimately their families. While feminist jurisprudence and other critical legal theories have challenged the naturalness and inevitability of the social order and exposed the power dynamics undergirding this constructed naturalness, child-centered jurisprudence has remained essentially a positivist endeavor. Evoking methods of feminist jurisprudence and applying lessons of childhood studies that the construction of childhood is not a natural fact, but developed in specific ways, in specific contexts, this Article begins the project of uncovering the contours and work of the legal definition and regulation of childhood, the social category in which children sit.

The Article first outlines the legal construction of childhood, which, like earlier constructions of women, portrays children as private, dependent, and developmental. Next, it compares feminist and child-centered jurisprudence, particularly as they have been organized around and addressed dependency, and argues that child-centered jurisprudence has not interrogated the naturalness, dependency, and privacy of childhood. The Article then illustrates philosophical, political, and material conditions that resulted in the present legal construction of childhood in the United States as a natural, private, and developmental site leading to adulthood and political citizenship. The Article concludes with a set of observations that might drive a jurisprudence of childhood toward a more critical and robust conception of justice for children as children and as the adults they will become.