Conceptualizing Legal Childhood in the Twenty-First Century

Columbia Law School Scholarship Archive Faculty Scholarship Faculty Publications 2019 Conceptualizing Legal Childhood in the Twenty-First Century Elizabeth S. Scott Columbia Law School, [email protected] Clare Huntington Fordham University School of Law, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the Family Law Commons, and the Juvenile Law Commons Recommended Citation Elizabeth S. Scott & Clare Huntington, Conceptualizing Legal Childhood in the Twenty-First Century, MICHIGAN LAW REVIEW, VOL. 118, P. 1371, 2020; COLUMBIA PUBLIC LAW RESEARCH PAPER NO. 14-633 (2019). Available at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/2536 This Working Paper is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Publications at Scholarship Archive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Scholarship Archive. For more information, please contact [email protected]. CONCEPTUALIZING LEGAL CHILDHOOD IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Clare Huntington† & Elizabeth S. Scott†† Forthcoming, Michigan Law Review The law governing children is complex, sometimes appearing almost incoherent. The relatively simple framework established in the Progressive era, in which parents had primary authority over children, subject to limited state oversight, has broken down over the past few decades. Lawmakers started granting children some adult rights and privileges, raising questions about their traditional status as vulnerable, dependent, and legally incompetent beings. As children emerged as legal persons, children’s rights advocates challenged the rationale for parental authority, contending that robust parental rights often harm children. And a wave of punitive reforms in response to juvenile crime in the 1990s undermined the state’s long- standing role as the protector of children. We address this seeming incoherence by identifying a deep structure and logic in the regulation of children that is becoming clear in the twenty-first century. In our conceptual framework, the law’s central goal, across multiple legal domains, is to promote child wellbeing. This unifying purpose has roots in the Progressive era, but three distinct characteristics distinguish the modern approach. Today, lawmakers advance child wellbeing with greater confidence and success by drawing on a wide body of research on child and adolescent development and the efficacy of related policies. This is bolstered by the clear understanding that promoting child wellbeing generally furthers social welfare, leading to a broader base of support for state policies and legal doctrines. Finally, there is a growing recognition that the regulation of children and families has long been tainted by racial and class bias and that a new commitment to minimizing these pernicious influences is essential to both the legitimacy and fairness of the regime. In combination, these features make the contemporary regulatory framework superior to earlier approaches. Rather than pitting the state, parents, and child in competition for control over children’s lives—the conception of family regulation since the 1960s—our Child Wellbeing framework offers a surprisingly integrated regulatory approach. Properly understood, parental rights and children’s rights, as well as the direct role of the state in children’s lives, are increasingly defined and unified by a research- driven, social-welfare-regarding effort to promote child wellbeing. This normatively attractive conceptualization of legal childhood does not define every area of legal regulation, but it is a strong throughline and should be elevated and embraced more broadly. In short, our framework brings coherence to the complex legal developments of the past half century and provides guidance moving forward for this critical area of the law. † Joseph M. McLaughlin Professor of Law, Fordham Law School. †† Harold R. Medina Professor of Law, Vice Dean for Curriculum, Columbia Law School. For their comments and suggestions, we are grateful to Susan Appleton, Albertina Antognini, Katharine Bartlett, Anita Bernstein, Emily Buss, Anne Dailey, Nestor Davidson, Maxine Eichner, Martin Guggenheim, Jill Hasday, Elizabeth Katz, Robin Lenhardt, Solangel Maldonado, Douglas NeJaime, Richard Revesz, Robert Scott, Emily Stolzenberg, and Jordan Woods, as well as workshop participants at Fordham Law School, St. John’s Law School, the University of Minnesota Law School, and with the New York Area Family Law Scholars. For careful research assistance, we are grateful to Edmund Costikyan, Denver Dunn, Eli Huscher, and Deborah Ogali. Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3448689 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................ 1 I. THE RISE AND FALL OF THE PROGRESSIVE ERA FRAMEWORK .................................. 6 A. The Rise of Progressive Paternalism ..................................................................................... 6 B. The Framework under Pressure .......................................................................................... 10 1. Challenging the Progressive Era Model of Juvenile Justice ................................ 11 2. Children’s Rights: Conceiving of Children as Legal Persons ............................. 15 3. Parental Rights under Siege ..................................................................................... 18 II. AN EMERGING FRAMEWORK: REVIVING CHILD WELLBEING ................................ 21 A. Juvenile Justice Reform: The Embodiment of the New Framework ..................................... 22 1. Catalysts for Reform ................................................................................................. 22 2. Modern Juvenile Justice Policy ................................................................................ 24 B. Direct Regulation of Families: Nascent Glimmers of the Child Wellbeing Framework ............................................................ 28 1. Policies of State Support .......................................................................................... 29 2. The Child Welfare System ....................................................................................... 31 3. A Blueprint for Reform ............................................................................................ 32 III. CHILD WELLBEING AND PARENTAL RIGHTS ............................................................ 34 A. Interpreting Parental Rights in the Child Wellbeing Framework ........................................ 35 B. The Framework in Practice ................................................................................................ 38 1. Corporal Punishment ................................................................................................ 38 2. Third-party Contact and De Facto Parents ........................................................... 41 3. Decisions about Medical Care ................................................................................. 45 4. Homeschooling .......................................................................................................... 47 IV. CHILD WELLBEING AND CHILDREN’S RIGHTS ......................................................... 49 A. Interpreting Children’s Rights in the Child Wellbeing Framework ...................................... 50 1. Child Wellbeing.......................................................................................................... 50 2. Social Welfare ............................................................................................................. 51 3. Developmental Research .......................................................................................... 53 4. Racial Equality and Children’s Rights .................................................................... 55 B. The Framework in Practice ................................................................................................ 56 1. Rights Granted to Minors ........................................................................................ 56 2. Rights Withheld from Minors ................................................................................. 63 V. ANTICIPATING CRITICISM ............................................................................................... 66 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................... 70 Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3448689 INTRODUCTION Over the past several decades, the law’s treatment of children has become increasingly complex and uncertain in ways that can seem to verge on incoherence. The problem stems from a breakdown of the Progressive era approach that governed for much of the twentieth century: In that framework, parents had authority to make most decisions about their children, subject to state regulation of issues such as education and child labor. The state also intervened directly with families to protect children from parental abuse and neglect and to rehabilitate children engaged in wayward or criminal conduct.1 Children in this regime were largely invisible as legal persons, presumed to be vulnerable, dependent, and incapable of making self-regarding decisions.2 Several developments in the second half of the twentieth century complicated this approach.

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