The Center for Children, Law & Policy at the University of Houston recently brought together a group of leading scholars to explore the connections and the tensions between “feminist jurisprudence” and “child-centered jurisprudence.” Audio from the conference is now available and video podcast will follow shortly. Publications from these presentations will be published next year in the Houston Law Review.

Agenda

Listen to Audio of the Presentations Below:

Polygamy and Child Welfare, Prof. Martin Guggenheim, Fiorello LaGuardia Professor of Clinical Law, New York University School of Law

Five Generations: Child Sexual Abuse and the Search for Transformative Justice, Prof. Angela P. Harris, Professor of Law; Executive Committee Member, Center for Social Justice, Boalt Hall, UC Berkeley

Voice, Vulnerability and Dependency: Politicizing Childhood, Prof. Annette Appell, Associate Dean of Clinical Affairs and Professor of Law, Washington University School of Law

Vulnerability Theory: Beyond Equality in Assessing the Interests of Mothers and Children, Prof. Martha Albertson Fineman, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law, Emory University School of Law

“A World Fit for Everyone:” The Role of Economic and Social Rights in Resolving the Tensions between Child-Centered and Feminist Jurisprudence, Prof. Barbara Bennett Woodhouse, David H. Levin Chair in Family Law, Director, Center on Children and Families, Fredric G. Levin College of Law

With Commentary by Prof. Ellen Marrus and Prof. Laura Oren of the University of Houston Law Center.

Hannah Jones, 13, is not afraid of dying - she is afraid of spending her remaining days in a hospital bed. In a case that raises a host of medical and ethical issues, the British teenager from a small town northwest of London has won a battle to refuse a heart transplant operation. That decision by British medical authorities has ignited a debate over whether children should have the right to refuse potentially lifesaving medical treatments or if health authorities have an obligation to intervene.

That heartbreaking story illustrates the difficult issues that surround the law’s treatment of children as individuals with a right to determine their future. When Hannah and her parents decided against the procedure the medical authorities threatened to take them to court to force her to have it.

Doctors are required to obtain informed consent before treating a patient because individuals are thought to have the right to control what is done to their bodies. This includes the right to control the course of medical treatment and even to refuse it altogether. As long as a person is competent, they have a constitutionally-protected liberty interest in refusing unwanted medical treatment, balanced against the state’s interests in protecting and preserving human life. Cruzan by Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Dept. of Health, 497 U.S. 261 (1990). A competent person has a right to refuse treatment even if the refusal ends in the individual’s death.

In general children are thought to lack the capacity to make life-altering decisions on their own. They may not fully understand the consequences or risks of their decision or the nature of their circumstances. The law defers to the judgment of parents or guardians in such situations.

While the Court has found that just like adults, a child also has a substantial liberty interest in not being confined unnecessarily for medical treatment, Parham v. J.R., 442 U.S. 584 (1979), the Court later noted that “In Parham… we certainly did not intimate that such a minor child, after commitment, would have a liberty interest in refusing treatment.” See Cruzan.

So where does that leave us?

In Hannah Jones’ case a social worker was sent to interview her about her refusal to have a heart transplant. After discussing it the social worker then backed Hannah’s decision, which was supported by her parents as well.

According to the Department of Health, when a child is considered competent and refuses treatment, their decision will be respected. When a consensus can’t be reached, the patient can be overruled by either parents or guardians, or in more unusual circumstances, by the courts.

The harder questions are of course when the child and the parents disagree, or the state finds circumstances that they feel justifies overruling both parent and child, such as what effect to give religious views regarding surgery or blood transfusions. The rate at which this issue comes before the courts is only likely to increase given that advances in medical technology may often prolong painful treatment periods that a child or parents may instead choose to avoid to improve the quality rather than the longevity of life.

Further Reading:

• Susan D. Hawkins, Protecting the rights and interests of competent minors in litigated medical treatment disputes. 64 Fordham L.R. 2075 (1996).
• Hillary Rodham, “Children Under the Law”, 43 Harv. Edu. Rev. 487 (1973).

The care and protection of children in Australia has now become a topic of concern for all governments in Australia today. The past year has seen a frenzy of activity with the intervention of the Federal Government into the Northern Territory to provide care and protection to aboriginal children and the proposed extension of this intervention into aboriginal communities in Queensland, the current Wood Inquiry in New South Wales into the significant failures of the child protection system, the findings by the South Australian Mullighan Inquiry into the sexual abuse of children in state care and its implications for all other state and territory jurisdictions, the National Youth Commission’s Report into the horrendous level of Youth Homelessness, and numerous other instances of serious concern regarding the inadequate standards of care and protection being provided to children and young people throughout Australia. What has become very clear is that Australia does not have a coherent national child protection policy and law to address many of these very serious issues. This absence of policy stems largely from Australia’s failure to incorporate the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child into law.

This article analyzes a serious conceptual flaw in immigration law related to its treatment of children. The extensive integration of immigrants into the broader population of families in the United States contrasts with several characteristics of the legal framework of immigration that create significant barriers to legal immigration for immigrant families. The article reveals how immigration law systemically devalues children and gives rise to a narrow, parent-centered conception of family. The article also uncovers the manner in which the excruciating complexity of immigration law can mask the ways in which seemingly innocuous immigration provisions work together to severely curtail immigration options for families in the United States. It examines the serious social consequences that result when families are unable to regularize the immigration status of all family members. Not only are immigrants and immigrant families marginalized, but citizen children in mixed status families are denied the full social benefits of citizenship as a variety of formal and informal barriers assimilate them to the status of noncitizen. Finally, the article discusses the underlying motivations for the current family immigration system and envisions a more child-centered approach.

The truly innovative part of the Carrell and Hoekstra study begins with their search for potentially disruptive kids: they looked for those coming from particularly difficult family situations. In particular, they combed through court records and linked every domestic violence charge in Alachua County, Florida to the county schooling records of kids living in those households.

It’s a sad story: nearly 5 percent of the kids in their sample could be linked to a household with a reported domestic violence incident. (And given under-reporting, the true number may be much larger.)

The costs of this dysfunction are even more profound. Kids exposed to domestic violence definitely do have lower reading and math scores and greater disciplinary problems. But the effects of this dysfunction are not limited to the direct victims of this violence: kids exposed to kids exposed to domestic violence also have lower test scores and more disciplinary infractions.

Around 70 percent of the classes in their sample have at least one kid exposed to domestic violence. The authors compare the outcomes of that kid’s classmates with their counterparts in the same school and the same grade in a previous or subsequent year — when there were no kids exposed to family violence — finding large negative effects.

This article explores, through American eyes, the choice of law rules associated with the child support aspects of the proposed Hague Convention on the International Recovery of Child Support and Other Forms of Family Maintenance. It considers the role these rules play in capturing the construct that is the family for the purposes of child support by implicitly determining who is an acceptable claimant and who is an appropriate obligor. In addition, the rules determine which jurisdiction’s law will establish the amount of support and thus, implicitly, they determine which jurisdiction sets the standards for family performance . American constitutional law demands a connection between the individual to be burdened and the jurisdiction imposing that burden. The proposed rules seem designed to take this into account, but doing so requires the scheme to abandon a preference for relying on the law of the creditor’s habitual residence. American child support proceedings use pre-established guidelines to determine the amount of any child support award. These guidelines, which are premised on economic conditions in the individual states, are not suited to dealing with international disputes. The cases suggest that American courts are reluctant to abandon the efficiency of the guidelines in favor of detailed fact based analysis, even if the result is an inappropriate order - certainty comes at a price.

Children are currently fighting as soldiers in over twenty countries. Denied a childhood and often subjected to horrific violence, an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 children are serving as soldiers for both rebel groups and government forces. Physically vulnerable and easily intimidated, children typically make obedient soldiers and participate in all aspects of warfare. Many are recruited by force, and often compelled to follow orders under threat of death.

The bill as enacted earlier this month seeks to accomplish this by the following:

The Child Soldiers Accountability Act makes it a federal crime to recruit knowingly or to use soldiers under the age of 15 and permits the United States to prosecute any individual on US soil for the offense, even if the children were recruited or served as soldiers outside the United States. The law imposes penalties of up to 20 years, or up to life in prison if their action resulted in the child’s death. It also allows the United States to deport or deny entry to individuals who have knowingly recruited children as soldiers.

Opinio Juris: Universal Jurisdiction in the US for Child Soldiers

What makes the Community School unusual is not its student body — plenty of schools around the country enroll teenagers with an autism spectrum disorder. But, like about only two dozen schools in the country, it employs a relatively new, creative and highly interactive teaching method known as D.I.R./Floortime, which is producing striking results among T.C.S.’s student body. (D.I.R. stands for developmental, individual differences, relationship-based approach.) The method is derived from the work of Stanley Greenspan, a child psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry, behavioral science and pediatrics at George Washington University, and his colleague Dr. Serena Wieder. D.I.R./Floortime can be effective with all kinds of children, whether they have developmental challenges or not. As applied by T.C.S., it is an approach that encourages students to develop their strengths and interests by working closely with one another and with their teachers. The goal for students is neurological progress through real-world engagement.

Melissa Faye Greene, Reaching an Autistic Teenager, New York Times, October 17, 2008.

WHEN he was growing up on the streets of Newark with both of his parents addicted to drugs and his father in jail, going to college wasn’t really on the horizon for Rameck Hunt. He was going to be lucky if he finished high school.

But Rameck had something that the other kids in his neighborhood didn’t have: two friends with whom he would form an unbreakable bond. Together they made a pact to support each other with dreams that in other neighborhoods might seem ordinary, but that in their hardscrabble world seemed improbable. They would not only finish high school but go on to college — and even medical school.

Jaqueline Mroz, Sharing Their Stories, New York Times, October 17, 2008

Hurricane Ike was an ill wind for tens of thousands of Houston-area children, who, more than a month after the storm blasted the Texas coast, are still hungry, fearful and sometimes abused, a coalition of social service providers warned Thursday.

"Things are getting back to normal," said Bob Sanborn, president of Children of Risk. "The lights are back on and schools are open. … But there are still problems, still needs. … Children are still in poverty. They still have hardships."

The children’s advocates gathered to call for support of the Houston Food Bank, which distributed 12 million pounds of food in the hurricane’s wake, and area day care centers, many of which were damaged and have not reopened.

Houston Chronicle: Storm over, but hunger, fear remain, Advocates push for food donations, day care support