Law Is Not Enough

This post is the third in a series by Executive Director and Co-Founder, Bob Schwartz. Over the coming months, Bob will reflect on Juvenile Law Center's four decades of advocacy work for children at risk. This year marks Juvenile Law Center's 40th anniversary, and we're looking forward to celebrating our past successes. However, this year is also about anticipating the next wave of threats to vulnerable youth and ensuring that children at risk have ample opportunity for success as adults. Read the first post here.

One of the ways we have grown as an organization is by paying attention to other disciplines. Social science, behavioral science, and neuroscience influence practice and policy for kids in the foster care and justice systems.

Four lawyers started Juvenile Law Center in 1975. As young practitioners we knew something about the law; we knew much less about child and adolescent development. Medicine and psychology were just beginning to inform our work. Doctors identified “The Battered Child Syndrome,” which led Congress to pass the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act in 1974. In the ‘70’s, psychiatrists, doctors and lawyers coined the term “psychological parent,” which had enormous influence in child protection and domestic relations custody disputes.

It was thus a defining moment when, a year after we opened, we hired Gloria Moses. Gloria would be our primary social worker for the next ten years. Having a social worker on staff had an enormous impact on the way we approached our large caseload of individual clients. We represented children of all ages in a wide variety of settings. These included cases involving child abuse and neglect, divorce, school discipline, special education, juvenile and criminal justice, mental health, and others.

Gloria helped us understand the facts of our cases. When we visited our clients, she helped us appreciate what was going on in their homes, foster homes, or residential programs. She helped us build a relationship with the children we represented; she could connect with them in ways we lawyers couldn’t. She talked the language of social work. This helped us when she participated in planning meetings with case workers or served as a witness in judicial or administrative proceedings.

We were not the only office to use an interdisciplinary approach, but we were one of the first in the country to do so. Forty years later, our model is the norm for lawyers who are serious about representing children.

Other disciplines are also important in developing policy. MacArthur Foundation’s Research Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice fostered a paradigm shift that led the United States Supreme Court in 2005 to end the juvenile death penalty. Since then, advocates using the science of adolescent development have shaped legislative and judicial decisions involving youth in the justice system. Science and research have also led Congress, state legislatures and courts to provide additional support to youth aging out of foster care.

In the centuries-old battle for justice for children, progress has eluded many reformers. The sciences—where progress is easier to discern—have thus had a profound impact on the work of Juvenile Law Center. We have used the tools at our disposal to ensure that laws, policies and practices affecting youth in the foster care and justice systems are consistent with what the sciences tell us about adolescent development, trauma, resilience, and so much more. This is progress. There is no stopping it.

Image credit: "It's the law!" via Olaf Gradin, licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic