The University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog

Student Blogger - Summer WIP: Emily Buss on the Role of Child Development Research in the Law

An abused child is picked up by social service workers after years of living on the street. The officers who see her remark how, despite her age, she behaves like an "adult". Another child commits a brutal murder. Politicians take to the mics and declare their support for "adult time for adult crime". Meanwhile, a twenty year old college student seems particularly bubbly and effervescent in class, leading her friends to remark on how childish she seems. These instincts reveal something fundamental but often forgotten about how we view children and childhood. Childhood isn't a static category applicable to anyone within the ages of 0 to 18. Rather, it is a contingent characterization dependent on social expectations and how individuals match them.

Yet often times, law, and indeed, much child development research, seems to take as a presumption that childhood can be isolated as a stable subject. When determining what rights and obligations to give and demand of minors, the law often makes assertions such as "Most children, even in adolescence, simply are not able to make sound judgments concerning many decisions, including their need for medical care or treatment" (Parham v. J.R. 442 U.S. 584, 603 (1979)). Not only is this probably a misstatement of even the dominant view of adolescent decision making capabilities, but it also takes as an unstated assumption that the decision making abilities of children are something static, unconnected with the legal and social environment that they are raised in.

It is this mistake that Emily Buss looks to tease out the implications of in her current work, "What the Law Should (and Should Not) Learn from Child Development Research". At times, the law simply seems to ignore child development research. At other times, it uses it, but in a very prescriptive way that does not contemplate that child capabilities might shift depending on legal and social contexts. But occasionally, the law does seem to take notice of how its own messages and prescriptions do not just manage but also create the developmental capacities of the children it watches over.

Aging Out of Foster Care: An Update on the Chicago Foster Care Project

Among recent innovations at the Law School are the Chicago Policy Initiatives - a set of research projects, run by our faculty with the help of both students and alumni, on a variety of subjects. You may have heard, for example, about the Chicago Judges Project, run by Cass Sunstein and others. Equally successful has been the Chicago Foster Care Project, run by Emily Buss. This project has focused on the difficulties faced by children as they "age out" of foster care, and various possibilites of how these difficulties might be mitigated. In November, 2005, Professor Buss delivered a Chicago's Best Ideas talk on this project. In May 2007, Professor Buss and some of her students gave a lunchtime talk bringing the Law School community up to speed on the current state of the project.  Listen to the discussion here. You might also want to check out some of the concrete results of her work at the Foster Care to Adulthood Wiki, summing up the legal landscape of foster care age-outs in all 50 states.

Chicago’s Policy Initiative on Foster Care

Emily Buss delivered an interesting entry into the Chicago's Best Ideas Series on November 10, 2005. The talk was entitled "Turning Best Ideas into Practice, Chicago’s Policy Initiative on Foster Care." The Law School has several projects known as Policy Initiatives, where the collective work and experience of faculty, students, and alumni are being focused on particular problems with the intent of providing potential solutions. Emily Buss is heading one such project on what happens to children who "age out" of the foster care system. In this talk, Emily discussed not only the specifics of the project, but also the inherent difficulties of doing this kind of empirical work. You can listen to the lecture and discussion here.

As always, instructions for listening and subscribing, should you need them, are available here. The blurb Emily used for the publicity for her talk is below the fold.