Academic

Appell on Child-Centered Jurisprudence

By Lawrence Solum

Annette Ruth Appell (Washington University School of Law in St. Louis) has posted The Pre-Political Child of Child-Centered Juriprusdence (Houston Law Review, Vol. 46, No. 3, 2009) on SSRN. Here is the 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.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.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on September 08, 2009 (boomark / email).