Catherine Smith, Vincent L. Bradford Professor of Regulation at Washington and Lee College, has revealed “The Grownup Rights-Bearing Archetype and How It Stifles Younger Individuals’s Equal Safety” within the Duke Journal of Constitutional Regulation & Public Coverage.
Professor Smith argues that whereas the U.S. Supreme Court docket has acknowledged youngsters as constitutional individuals and proclaimed that neither the Fourteenth Modification nor the Invoice of Rights is for adults alone, the courts “principally see autonomous, rational, individualistic, income-generating grown folks as rights-bearers.” Her article reveals six adult-rights-bearing analytical traps that restrict youngsters’s equal safety and proposes jettisoning the Carolene Merchandise check in favor of a youth-based framework.
Smith concludes the paper by arguing that “[i]nstead of shoehorning youngsters’s rights into” an online of legal guidelines designed for adults, “discrimination in opposition to youngsters deserves a framework by itself phrases.” In that vein, she introduces three youth-based paths to heightened scrutiny when legal guidelines: (1) use youngsters as a method to create or preserve a caste system; (2) punish youngsters for issues over which they haven’t any management; or (3) erect an insurmountable barrier to youngsters’s potential within the political course of to treatment large-scale catastrophic hurt inflicted upon them, such because the disproportionate accidents to younger folks from the local weather disaster and gun violence.”
The article was written because the anchor for the symposium titled “Youngsters’s Equality Regulation: Partaking the Work of Professor Catherine Smith,” which was hosted by the Duke Journal of Constitutional Regulation & Public Coverage in 2024.
The article is available online on the W&L Scholarly Commons.
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