The University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog

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.