Transforming the Legal Landscape For Children
Our Mission
To ensure that every child—regardless of background, identity, or circumstance—is seen and protected under the law. We work to expand how the Constitution is interpreted and applied, bringing children’s constitutional rights from the margins to the center of justice.
Founding Story
Rights4Children was founded in 2023 by three nationally recognized legal scholars—Professors Tanya Washington, Robin Walker Sterling, and Catherine Smith—whose work has shaped major constitutional decisions and given voice to the unique legal needs of children. United by a shared belief in the law’s capacity to do good, they envisioned a place where legal research, teaching, and advocacy could coalesce into a national force for children’s justice.
Their decades of experience—as litigators, educators, and authors of influential scholarship and amicus briefs—form the backbone of our work today.
Our Founders
Catherine smith
Bio
Catherine Smith is the Vincent L. Bradford Professor of Law at the Washington and Lee University School of Law and an expert in children’s constitutional rights. Her teaching, scholarship, and service seek to understand and contribute to a robust children’s equality law. In 2010, her essay “The Rights of the Child” was selected as a winning essay in the Association of American Law School writing competition titled “On the Cutting Edge: Charting the Future of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Scholarship.” In 2011, her article “Equal Protection for Children of Gay and Lesbian Parents: Challenging the Three Pillars of Exclusion – Legitimacy, Dual-Gender Parenting, and Biology” was awarded the Williams Institute’s Dukeminier Award as one of 2010’s best sexual orientation law review articles.
In 2015, Professor Smith’s co-authored amicus brief on the rights of children of same-sex couples was cited and relied upon in the landmark same-sex marriage decision, Obergefell v. Hodges. Smith contributed to a child-centric chapter (“concurring opinion”) in the book “What Obergefell v. Hodges Should Have Said: The Nation’s Top Legal Experts Rewrite America’s Same-Sex Marriage Opinion” (Jack M. Balkin, ed., Yale University Press, 2020). Professor Smith was an expert in Juliana v. United States and Navahine v. Hawai’i Department of Transportation, two ground-breaking, youth-led climate cases.
After graduating from the University of South Carolina School of Law, Professor Smith clerked for the late Chief Judge Henry A. Politz of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and for U.S. Magistrate Judge William M. Catoe, Jr. She then served as a legal fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center before entering legal academia. Before joining the faculty at Washington and Lee University School of Law, Professor Smith taught at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law and the Thurgood Marshall School of Law.
Robin Walker Sterling
Bio
Robin Walker Sterling is the Associate Dean for Clinical Education, Director of the Bluhm Legal Clinic, and the Mayer Brown-Robert A. Helman Professor of Law at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. Before joining the Northwestern Law faculty, Professor Walker Sterling was the Ronald V. Yegge Clinical Co-Director and Associate Professor at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, where she co-taught the Criminal Defense Clinic and the Immigration Law and Policy Clinic. Professor Walker Sterling has served as a Visiting Professor at Yale Law School and at the University of Ghana, Legon, as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar. Professor Walker Sterling holds a B.A. from Yale University, a J.D. from New York University School of Law, and an LL.M. from Georgetown University Law Center.
Following law school, Professor Walker Sterling served as law clerk to the Honorable Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the District Court for the District of Columbia; as the Stuart-Stiller Teaching Fellow in the E. Barrett Prettyman Fellows program at Georgetown University Law Center, representing adults and children charged with criminal offenses in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, and supervising third-year law students in the Juvenile Justice Clinic; as a staff attorney at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia; as a guardian ad litem representing youths in dependency proceedings at the Children’s Law Center; and as Special Counsel at the National Juvenile Defender Center.
For the last twenty years, the focus of Professor Walker Sterling’s practice, teaching and legal scholarship has been juvenile defense and delinquency, clinical advocacy, and criminal defense and procedure, with an emphasis on how system involvement affects youths and families of individuals incarcerated as youth. Her work, which has been cited in children’s rights and criminal procedure textbooks and in appellate court decisions in several jurisdictions, includes: amicus briefs filed in state supreme courts and the United States Supreme Court; policy papers and reports investigating states’ indigent juvenile defense delivery systems; and law review articles published in several law journals, including the Iowa Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, and the Michigan Law Review. Professor Walker Sterling’s research and teaching interests include clinical advocacy, critical race theory, criminal law and procedure, and juvenile justice.
Tanya Washington
Bio
Tanya Washington is the Marjorie F. Knowles Chair in Law and Professor of Children’s Constitutional Rights at Georgia State University College of Law. She earned her Juris Doctorate degree from the University of Maryland School of Law and clerked for Associate Judge Robert M. Bell on the Maryland Court of Appeals. After practicing as a toxic tort defense litigator in the Baltimore office of Piper & Marbury, she completed the Albert M. Sacks Fellowship in Criminal Justice, the Judge A. Leon Higginbotham Fellowship in Social Justice and earned her LL.M. from Harvard Law School.
Professor Washington has taught Civil Procedure I and II, Family Law, Education Law and Race and Law at Georgia State College of Law for the past 22 years. Her research and scholarship focus on issues related to educational equity and affirmative action; domestic violence; racial (in)justice; inclusion and diversity; marriage equality; and children’s constitutional rights. Her articles and op-eds have been published in law journals and periodicals across the nation and Professor Washington has co-authored five (5) amicus briefs filed in U.S. Supreme Court cases, including in the Court’s marriage equality decision, Obergefell v. Hodges. Her co-authored brief was cited by Justice Kennedy in the majority opinion of that landmark ruling. Currently, she is working with the Fulton County Reparations Task Force on its Harm Report, which details the history of Fulton County laws, policies, systems, and practices that generated resources and profits for the County, at the expense of Black Fulton County residents’ lives, rights, economic opportunities, labor, and well-being.
Professor Washington believes the true value of the law lies in its capacity to improve the human condition and this creed animates her work. Professor Washington has worked collaboratively to ensure that legal scholarship has a practical and positive impact for vulnerable individuals and communities. She served for three years on the Atlanta Human Relations Commission, volunteered with various organizations that provide support to Atlanta’s growing unsheltered population, cooked and served food at area soup kitchens, and provided countless hours of pro-bono work. Her work as an activist educator also includes serving for 2 years as Director of the John Lewis Fellowship Program, a Humanity in Action program funded by a grant to the National Center for Civil and Human Rights from the Mellon Foundation. She served on the Board of Freedom University and currently serves as Board Chair for the Housing Justice League and the Center for Civic Innovation. Professor Washington’s work as a public intellectual has been recognized and celebrated by the Gate City Bar, with the President’s Award for Excellence, and by Georgia State University, with the Alumni Distinguished Faculty Award for Teaching and Scholarship and with the College of Law Kaminshine Service Award. She served as the inaugural President of the Faculty of the African Diaspora Association (FADA) for Georgia State University, and she frequently conducts team building and trainings and workshops for organizations, law firms and university departments.
For 10 years, Professor Washington stood with her neighbors and community against the predatory use of eminent domain in her neighborhood of Peoplestown, by the City of Atlanta, and that experience prepared her to support other individuals and communities facing eminent domain in Georgia and across the nation. Professor Washington’s most treasured contributions are the seeds she has planted in her two amazing sons, André and Milan, and in the generations of students she has had the blessing of teaching and learning from!
The Legal Legacy That Inspires Rights4Children
While the Rights4Children movement is new, we stand on the shoulders of legal giants who began their innovative work as students. In 1944, in the heart of Jim Crow, discussions at Howard Law School focused on strategies to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court decision that enshrined “separate but equal” as the law of the land for five decades. Legal efforts at the time sought to dismantle Jim Crow by attacking the reality that segregated facilities for Black people were not “equal” to those available to white people.
One law student—the only woman in the class at Howard Law School that year—suggested challenging the very idea that “separate” educational facilities could ever be equal. The student, Pauli Murray, bet their professor that Plessy would be overturned based on this theory. Murray was, of course, right.
Rights4Children is inspiring modern-day Pauli Murrays to take intellectual risks, share their ideas, and advance them in courtrooms and policy arenas towards reimagining children’s rights and building a brighter and more just future for all of us.
Their decades of experience—as litigators, educators, and authors of influential scholarship and amicus briefs—form the backbone of our work today.