Juvenile Law Center

Founded in 1975, the Juvenile Law Center (the Center) is the oldest non-profit, public interest law firm devoted to children and youth in the United States. Through legal, policy, and youth-led advocacy, community partnerships, and strategic communications, the Center strives to ensure that laws, policies, and practices advance racial and economic equity and recognize the developmental differences that distinguish youth from adults. Two decades of juvenile justice reform beginning in the late 1990s rolled back the harsh, punitive, and retributive laws and policies that treated young people as if they were adults, including the abolishment of the juvenile death penalty. The proposed award enables the Center to plan, organize, and convene leaders and experts from diverse, multidisciplinary fields of research and scholarship, policy, practice, advocacy, and lived experience to identify strategies to respond to the emerging threats to developmentally appropriate implementation of laws and practices to respond to youthful offending.

The Juvenile Law Center (the Center) is the oldest non-profit, public interest law firm devoted to children and youth in the United States. The award enables the Center to reconvene criminology and behavioral researchers, law scholars, and youth justice practitioners from several nations for a second meeting to identify strategies for addressing and managing youthful offending through their respective legal or justice systems, as well as related issues concerning child protection. The aim is to foster a cross-national exchange on their different approaches to youth justice with the goal of learning from each other’s knowledge and experience to inform the future development and improvement of each nation’s laws, policies, and practices. Plans include reviewing six papers produced as a result of the previous meeting and discussing publication of the papers and related communications activities.

The Juvenile Law Center (the Center) is the oldest non-profit, public interest law firm devoted to children and youth in the United States. The award enables the Center to convene criminology and behavioral researchers, law scholars, and youth justice practitioners from several nations to identify strategies for addressing and managing youthful offending through their respective legal or justice systems, as well as related issues concerning child protection. The aim is to foster a cross-national exchange on their different approaches to youth justice with the goal of learning from each other’s knowledge and experience to inform the future development and improvement of each nation’s laws, policies, and practices.

The Juvenile Law Center (the Center) is one of the oldest public interest law firms devoted to children in the United States. For over a decade, the Center has been one of the leading advocates on challenges to the adult sentencing of juveniles, coordinating amicus briefs, serving as co-counsel in appellate cases, testifying before state legislatures, and most recently acting as co-counsel in Montgomery v. Louisiana, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2016 landmark case holding Miller v. Jackson (eliminating mandatory juvenile life without parole sentences) retroactive. While there is a clear presumption in Montgomery against juvenile life without parole sentences, state courts have not consistently followed the Supreme Court’s directives. To avoid the challenges of conflicting decisions and rulings in new sentencing hearings to be held across the country, a national funders collaborative is supporting a coordinated set of activities – including legal research and analysis, policy and legal advocacy, and strategic communications - to ensure effective and consistent legal representation. To complement and strengthen the effort to ensure appropriate implementation of Montgomery, this grant enables the Center to create and disseminate a national multi-day training curricula for counsel representing individuals in re-sentencing hearings, with a particular emphasis on adolescent development and modeled on death penalty mitigation sentencing programs.

The Juvenile Law Center (the Center) is one of the oldest public interest law firms devoted to children in the United States. This award supports a symposium, jointly convened by the Center and Temple Law Review at Temple University School of Law, which explores the sometimes-opposing themes that practitioners, researchers and policymakers working on behalf of youth must balance. Research supports youths’ immature decision-making, impetuosity, and need for protection but it also supports empowering court-involved youth to have their voices heard, their need to be treated fairly, and their right to make certain decisions about their court cases and their lives. The symposium features several speakers who were part of the Foundation’s Research Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice. The symposium, honoring the Center’s 40th Anniversary, builds upon the Center’s past work and provides a platform for the next stage of advocacy in the juvenile justice field.