Book Review

This concise book explores the origins and early history of the Cook County Juvenile Court, the world’s first such court. The court, which opened on July 3, 1899, in Chicago, reflected its founders’ profound faith both in science to solve social problems and the power of the state to provide for the best interests of its children. Yet, as Getis argues, the juvenile court did not live up to its initial promise, and “instead of a place of experimentation and reform—which it could have been—or a place of individualized justice guided by science—perhaps an unattainable goal—the court became an institution without idealism.” The Juvenile Court and the Progressives seeks to discover not only what went wrong, but also what is fundamentally wrong with the progressive conception of a juvenile court

Pursuing Justice for the Child: The Forgotten Women of In re Gault

In this article, I first draw on my recent book The Constitutional Rights of Children to introduce the facts of the case and place the case in the larger context of the history of American juvenile justice. I then focus specifically on the role of four remarkable women in the history of this landmark decision: Marjorie Gault, Gerald\u27s mother; Amelia Lewis, Gerald\u27s lawyer; Lorna Lockwood, an Arizona lawyer who became the first woman to serve as the Chief Justice of a State Supreme Court; and Getrude Traute Mainzer, who assisted in the litigation of Gerald\u27s case before the U.S. Supreme Court. Focusing on the role of these women as mothers, children\u27s advocates, lawyers, legal researchers, and state actors challenges the conventional framework for the history of social welfare law. For instance, these women articulated visions of social justice that challenged the paternalistic justifications used to legitimate juvenile justice for much of the twentieth century. They also did not accept the strict individualistic constitutional based argument of prominent male lawyers, such as Justice Abe Fortas. Their stories, I believe, suggest that instead of contrasting the Progressive Era and the 1960s, historians must pay closer attention to the parallels and continuities between these two historical eras, including the strikingly similar role of women reformers in both periods

First Things First: Juvenile Justice Reform in Historical Context

In my remarks today, I will explain how conceptions of children\u27s rights have been used to shape the American juvenile justice system\u27s development. First, I will argue that we should take a long view of this history. Next, I will focus on three specific eras of twentieth-century reform. Finally, I will conclude with a call for more research on the prosecutor\u27s role in administering juvenile justice. This historical perspective, I believe, can help us to answer the challenging question of what children\u27s rights should be

Toward a Legal History of Children as Witnesses

This essay offers a selective overview of recent trends in the historical scholarship on American childhood from the origins of the American Revolution to the early years of the Cold War. This overview of the literature has two purposes. First, it highlights recent sociocultural scholarship that presents substantive challenges to the conventional ways of understanding the history of children and the law. Second, in so doing, it points out that legal histories concerned solely with doctrinal matters can, and often do, present a limited and distorted window into the past. Instead, the essay argues that the place of children, historically, has been far more complex and contingent than many, both inside and outside the courtroom, have assumed

Owing to the Extreme Youth of the Accused: The Changing Legal Response to Juvenile Homicide

In this essay, the authors seek to dispel the myth that the juvenile court was never intended to deal with serious and violent offenders; a myth that has largely been unchallenged, especially in the mainstream media, and one that critics of the juvenile court have used to undermine its legitimacy. The discovery of homicide data from the Chicago police department from the early twentieth century, the era in which modern juvenile justice came of age, provides us with new historical date with which to put this dangerous myth to rest, by showing that the nation’s model juvenile court—the Cook County Juvenile Court—did hear many cases of juvenile homicide. In addition, the database has helped us to reconstruct important parts of the overall legal response to juvenile homicide in this period. We have discovered that the early twentieth century legal response to juvenile homicide was far more flexible than today’s approach, and that there were more institutional checks in the system to protect children from overly aggressive prosecution of their cases in the criminal justice system