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Abstract:
Children's rights pose a paradox for legal theory. We visualize rights-bearers as autonomous individuals. Yet children come into the world completely dependent and only gradually acquire autonomy. Given the complex nature of children's situation, rights must be revisualized to include not only capacity based rights, recognizing children's emerging autonomy, but also needs based rights, recognizing children's essential dependence on adults to provide nurture and protection. This paper identifies five basic human rights principles and applies them to children's special situation: 1) the equality principle becomes the right to equal opportunity; (2) the individualism principle becomes the right to be treated as a unique individual and not as an object; (3) the privacy principle honors the child's intimate relationships; (4) the protection principle requires government to protect the weak from the strong; and (5) the empowerment principle supports the child's right to a voice in court proceedings. This revisioning of rights also exposes the limitations of any rights theory that fails to recognize the linkage between human dependency and individual autonomy.

Abstract:
This amicus curiae brief was filed in support of the appeal by Lionel Tate of his conviction of felony murder. Lionel, at age 12, crushed his six year old cousin while imitating World Wrestling Federation moves. Tried as an adult, he was sentenced by a Broward County Florida criminal court to life in prison without parole. The amicus brief argues that it was both bad law and bad public policy to charge a 12 year old with murder utilizing the underlying felony of "aggravated child abuse." Issues discussed include the child's capacity to understand his acts, doctrines of merger, and the history and interpretation of child abuse laws.

Abstract:
The growing field of childhood studies has begun to gain traction among legal scholars, many of whom are giving new thought and voice to rights of children. The author, a pioneer in advocating for children’s legal and political rights, explores the significance of children in social movements from the American Revolution to the Civil Rights Movement, arguing that history is too quick to forget the lasting impact children have had on societal change. The author also mounts the case for increased legal recognition of children as people in their own right, rather than merely as 'pre-adults,' discussing the current status of children in legal systems. Looking primarily at foster care and child welfare systems, she points out the problems with the secondary role children are often relegated to in proceedings that purport to have their best interests at heart. Finally, the author argues that contemporary children and young adults around the world have earned the right to increased political participation by demonstrating valuable social and political insight and judgment.

children’s agency, children’s participation rights, children’s voice, children in civil rights movement, foster children, GLBT youth, youth participation, children’s political participation, UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC)

Abstract:
This paper contrasts the constitutional jurisprudence of the United States regarding positive or welfare rights with their broader acceptance in other peer nations and in international law. It focuses particularly on resistance within the U.S. to ratification of the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which has been ratified by every other nation except Somalia. The author concludes that shared human vulnerability, which is present throughout life but especially salient in childhood, is the essential reality that undergirds the concept of needs-based rights and is a more useful starting point for thinking about rights than the notion of autonomy or individualism.

children’s rights, UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), treaty ratification, constitutional law, positive rights, negative rights, comparative law, human rights, vulnerability, solidarity, child welfare, status of children

Abstract:
This article describes an interdisciplinary approach to research, practice and policy formation when dealing with issues of importance to children and youth. The authors, a child psychiatrist, a professor of law, and a social worker, discuss the utilization of a team-based approach linking the various disciplines at all levels - from clinical to theoretical - and in a number of arenas - from evaluations of individual children to the study of children's issues.

Abstract:
Woodhouse's chapter in this book explores the history in America of publicly funded fostering as a response to family disruption. It examines the impact of new federal legislation that radically shifts the emphasis away from the support of biological families (through fostering) to a policy favoring dissolution of disrupted families and the creation of new families (through adoption). Her chapter analyzes the positives and negatives of this new policy and concludes that, while the objective of assuring that all children have a safe and permanent home is a worthy one, the new reforms run a severe risk of treating women engaged in mothering - particularly poor women and women of color - as fungible commodities that can be interchanged without cost to child, parent, or society.

Abstract:
This essay investigates the use of ALI Prinicpals in child custody issues arising between not only biological parents but also "third-parties" who have been situated in loco parentis. Generism is a term coined by the author to describe the method that explores legal issues through a child-centered lens. This essay uses generism to probe the outcome on child custody when ALI principals are used and exposes the shortcomings of those principals, which adopt an adult-centric view when defining parenthood and thus fail to adequately recognize the importance to children of a de facto parenting relationship.

Abstract:
This article reviews a book that has made an important contribution by assisting judges when they make decisions regarding visitation and custody issues. The book, Legal and Mental Health Perspectives on Child Custody Law: A Deskbook for Judges, provides a framework to help judges make child-centric decisions regarding important emotional and legal decisions after considering all the facts. Woodhouse reviews the book with a special eye towards the rights of the child, and highlights the relative absence of discussion of children?s rights. This article also investigates the re-interpretation of 'best interest of the child' from a children's rights perspective, which results in better judicial decisions and empowers both the parents and the child in the process.

Abstract:
This essay explores the implications of Troxel for children at risk of foster care placement. It highlights the potential roles of University-Based Interdisciplinary Children's Centers (UBICC) in advocating for children's needs and in influencing the courts and legislatures to use a developmentally-informed and child-centered perspective when evaluating laws and making public policy. The authors describe the use of friend of the court briefs as a vehicle for presenting courts with interdisciplinary perspectives on issues of importance to children.

Abstract:
This essay investigates the negative impact of Pierce v. Society of Sisters in perpetuating an adult-centric model of family rights that treats children as property of adults. This essay looks at cases which illustrate how family autonomy and family privacy, when used in the name of protection from state intervention, may often place children at risk of abuse. Woodhouse contends that when children are abused, or not protected by their parents, the fiction of family unity becomes a dangerous one, and that Pierce, in constitutionalizing rights of the parents, obstructs the development of a modern theory of
children's rights and ignores the realities of children's lives.

Abstract:
Children's stories have too often been ignored by history, especially those of children or youths growing up at the intersections of race, gender and class. This article inspects the ways in which an individual's status as a minor in nineteenth century America interacted with institutions of slavery and indenture, and burdens of poverty and illegitimacy. The article uses the story of Frederick Douglass' childhood and youth as a springboard to explore the lives of nineteenth century urban boys in slavery and sevitude. As the young Douglass noted, "all boys are bound to someone" although some were "slaves for life." The article then focuses on the similar but distinctive challenges faced by urban girls in slavery. Drawing upon the stories of Eliza and Lizzie Scott, it shows how their stories were subsumed in that of their famous father in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford. It explores the special challenges faced by black urban girls, and the special courage of those girls who escaped to free territory. The article closes by arguing that children's experiences of slavery and servitude can contribute to the ongoing task of interpreting the meaning of "liberty" under the Fourteenth Amendment.

Abstract:
Reformers heralded the twentieth century as "The Century of the Child." In international law, that description proved prophetic. Children's rights have moved from the margins of discussion to center stage. The 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child is the most rapidly and universally accepted human rights document of our century. The Convention is striking evidence of a major twentieth-century revolution in how we conceptualize children's law. This essay provides a condensed and admittedly impressionistic account of the development of the best interest standard and of the arguments raised both for and against it. The author concludes that the future of custody law lies in perfecting the best interest standard, not in abandoning it for simpler alternatives that lack a child-centered justification.