Description
Book SynopsisAnalyses landmark US Supreme Court cases involving children's free speech and due process rights and argues that our ideas about civic and legal judgment are deeply contested concepts instead of simple character traits.
Trade Review“Are children true citizens under the Constitution? Timothy Barouch provides a detailed and subtle analysis drawing on clusters of cases to explore the principal models addressing child citizenship. Because children are ‘in between’ noncitizenship and full citizenship, Barouch deftly uses his analysis to develop important insights into the promise of an ‘inclusive citizenship.’ This book will be a critical resource for theorists of democracy, legal rhetoricians, and constitutional scholars.”- Francis J. Mootz III, author of
Rhetorical Knowledge in Legal Practice and Critical Legal Theory;
“Children make trouble for the law. Not by virtue of what they do, but by virtue of who they are. Law is challenged to recognize and acknowledge both their humanity and their distinctiveness.
The Child before the Court offers an unusual and insightful analysis of those challenges. Its attention both to judicial opinions and public discourse make it a very valuable resource for interdisciplinary exploration. It is theoretically sophisticated, and it uses that sophistication to offer a compelling illumination of the ways law comprehends childhood.”- Austin Sarat, editor of
Imagining Legality: Where Law Meets Popular Culture and
Knowing the Suffering of Others: Legal Perspectives on Pain and its Meanings;
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The Child Before the Court: Citizenship and the Constitution demonstrates how judicial representations of the ‘child’ serve as a representative anecdote for understanding and negotiating the problem of ‘judgment’ in modern and late-modern US liberal-democratic public culture. The analysis of judicial discourse is both careful and deft, and the conclusions regarding the affordances of legal decision making and the crafting of judgment in public culture writ large are compelling. More than just a study of the rhetoric of legal discourse it is a model for how we might engage challenges to the legitimacy of liberal-democracy in contemporary times.”- John Louis Lucaites, coauthor of
The Public Image: Photography and Civic Spectatorship
