Children and the Law

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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.