I thank Elizabeth Scott, Richard Bonnie, Emily Buss, Clare Huntington, and Solangel Maldonado for their work on the Restatement and for creating a productive space for discussion of its implications. I thank Steph Pettit for research and discussion on Sojourner Truth. Finally, thank you to Christopher Lau for reading everything I write.
This Essay documents the limitations of the parental rights lens for Black families and argues that the more appropriate lens for marginalized families focuses on the survival of both individual families and the larger community tied to these families. With this in mind, it contemplates what the future of the Restatement might hold against the backdrop of a reconfigured framework.
She thanks Esther Hong, Zalman Rothschild, and Lisa Washington, as well as the participants and organizers of the University of Chicago’s 2023 Law Review Symposium on Children and the Law.
Children’s lives are increasingly shaped by their online environment, quite apart from the physical geographies of home and school. How they make choices in that space, and how those choices are shaped by law and parental authority, warrants deeper discussion than the Restatement of Children and the Law was able to provide. The complex challenges of children’s engagement with social media, both as content creators and consumers, help illuminate some of the core tensions in this Part of the Restatement—namely, the tension between children’s autonomy, parental authority, and state regulation.
