All Publications
Creating new ideas to advance children’s rights is at the core of Rights4Children’s work. Our founders and collaborators have developed innovative frameworks and scholarship that bring children’s constitutional rights to the forefront of legal discourse. See what we’ve published below.
This article argues that transracial adoption can serve children’s best interests when adoptive parents receive racial competency training that prepares them to support children of color in navigating the realities of race and racism.
This article argues that same-sex adoption bans disproportionately harm Black children in foster care by shrinking the pool of permanent adoptive homes and exposing them to prolonged temporary or institutional care that undermines their best interests.
This article argues that same-sex adoption bans harm children in state care by restricting access to permanent homes, violating their best interests and constitutional liberty interests in favor of discriminatory placement barriers.
This article argues that same-sex adoption bans violate children’s constitutional rights by limiting access to permanent adoptive homes, despite evidence that such bans harm waiting children by prolonging foster care or institutional placement.
This amicus brief argues that marriage bans harmed children in same-sex families by denying them legal, economic, social, and psychological protections while punishing them for family circumstances beyond their control.
Amid the Supreme Court’s sound and fury about Smith’s awkward and confusing application to religious liberty interests, there was a deafening silence about the direct harm foster children will experience at the hands of the exemption the Court embraced. In the Court’s decision in Fulton, children and their interests were neither seen nor heard.
This essay asserts the primacy of children’s interests as a constitutional check on the religious liberty interests of government contractors that express in ways adverse to the best interests of foster children harmed by discriminatory foster care screening processes.
This article argues that broad religious exemptions to anti-discrimination laws can give legal force to private bias in ways that harm LGBTQ families and undermine children’s constitutional rights, especially in child-centered settings like foster care and education.
An Indiana Law Review article arguing that post-Windsor marriage equality litigation too often centered adults’ rights while overlooking how DOMA and state marriage bans harmed children in same-sex families, especially by threatening their legal relationship with non-biological parents.
In August of 2015, the ink was still drying on the Supreme Court of the United States’s landmark decision in Obergefell v. Hodges when Kim Davis, a municipal county court clerk in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, refused to issue a marriage license to a same-sex couple seeking to exercise their newly, constitutionally enshrined marriage rights.
Concurring Opinion in What Obergefell v. Hodges Should Have Said: The Nation’s Top Legal Experts Rewrite America’s Same-Sex Marriage Decision (Jack Balkin ed. Yale Univ. Press 2020
(Symposium ¾ Children’s Equality Law: Engaging the Work of Professor Catherine Smith)
Catherine E. Smith and Susannah Pollvogt
Catherine E. Smith
Robin Sterling
Tanya Washington
