Academic

Dillard on the Children's Rights Convention

By Lawrence Solum

Carter Dillard (Loyola University New Orleans) has posted Prospective Parents and the Children's Rights Convention (American University International Law Review, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

This Article addresses the novel question of whether states parties can successfully implement the Children?s Rights Convention by placing legal obligations on prospective parents, thereby influencing not just a child?s environment, but also the procreation of that child. First, the Article takes a unique version of the child-centered perspective, one that recognizes that as we move back in time in the direction of and even before a child?s birth, our obligations to the child grow because our actions become ever more influential. The perspective also takes into account current moral theories of parental obligation to prospective children. The Article then interprets the Convention from this perspective, exploring whether it requires states to pursue policies that heighten prospective parents? perceptions of the duties they owe their prospective children before having them.

If the Convention represents a sea change in the international legal community?s thinking about the relationship between children and adults, it has also inadvertently initiated another sea change: altering the traditional relationship between prospective parents and their prospective children, and with it the right to procreate.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on June 24, 2009 (boomark / email).