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Child, Family, and State: Problems and Materials on Children and the Law

THIS is a large book designed to be used in a law school course on children and the law. The materials are interspersed with stimulating questions for the student, including at one point an invitation to draft a reforming statute. The range of the book is remarkably wide and includes such diverse topics as fluoridation of public water supplies, euthanasia, driving licences and even " drinking." On the other hand, although one of the seven sections is, very naturally, devoted to child custody, the subject of visitation (i.e., access), which raises interesting and important problems, receives only half a page. What is particularly striking to the English reader is the plethora of cases which have been fought on the basis of constitutionality. Many of these make fascinating reading, examples being Gault (on the question of due process for juveniles accused of delinquency), Yoder (whether Amish children must attend school), and Tinker (a child's right to wear a black armband at school in protest at the Vietnam war). While one welcomes the decisions in some at least of these and similar cases, one is left wondering whether the volume of litigation which the American constitution appears to generate is entirely healthy. Is it really very satisfactory, for example, that when a State sees fit to enact a statute making it an offence to sell contraceptives to a young child, its validity should be challenged in the Supreme Court? Many of the legal principles discussed in this book will be familiar to an English reader, though a few may cause surprise, such as an obligation in California for an adult child to maintain his parents, and a curfew on juveniles in Illinois. He will be pleased to see a few references to English law (though at page 215 mention might have been made of our legislation in 1975); and he may feel slightly bewildered by some of the abbreviations used in the citation of statute law! American authors have already set a high standard for casebooks in the field of family law and this volume, though concerned with a different but overlapping area, maintains that tradition. It will repay study on both sides of the Atlantic.