How should
the law reflect and incorporate our evolving understanding of what it means to
be a child? Across multiple areas of law, much of the focus has long been on
children’s capacity for critical decision-making, and legal actors are
increasingly turning to other disciplines to better understand juvenile cognition
and psycho-social functioning. In the areas of criminal law and procedure, new
insights from the fields of neuroscience and behavioral psychology have been
instrumental in abolishing the juvenile death penalty and mandatory life
without parole. But these developments can create tension with the efforts of
children’s advocates to press for greater autonomy in other areas, including
reproductive rights, health care decision-making, gender identity, free speech,
and religious exercise. And scholars have voiced other reasons to think
critically about the turn towards developmental jurisprudence, including the
importance of cultural norms in constructing childhood and the error of
treating cognitive capacity as determinate and independent of external influences.
In this panel we take a comprehensive look at children as decision-makers,
drawing on legal, social, and scientific perspectives to examine the treatment
of children in the law.
The section held a virtual business meeting in advance of the Annual Meeting.