Juvenile-Sex-Offender Registration: An Impermissible Life Sentence

How often do Supreme Court opinions include what might be called “lobbying language,” which endorses a policy position while calling for another government entity to realize it? Reviewing relevant cases, this Essay finds that the sample set includes at least a dozen examples of lobbying language. As it turns out, lobbying is not so unusual for the Supreme Court.

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.

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.