The Restatement of Children and the Law, formally adopted by the American Law Institute (ALI) in 2024, offers the first comprehensive treatment of the regulation of children and youth under American law. The Restatement results from the combined efforts of six Reporters, working for almost nine years, with a group of advisors from both academia and legal practice. The decision to undertake this Restatement grew out of enthusiasm among ALI members for a new project focusing on families and children after the Institute adopted the Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution in 2002. This new Restatement covers most of the landscape of American law's relationship to children. The Restatement is organized in four Parts: Children in Families, dealing with parental rights and authority and state intervention in families; Children in Schools, covering children's rights and the state's obligations and authority (and its limits) in the public school context; Children in the Justice System, covering the rights and protections of youths in both the juvenile and criminal systems; and Children in Society, dealing with the law's relationship to children unmediated by the institutions of the family, school or justice system.
A body of scholarship has begun to emerge on this Restatement, analyzing its incorporation of modern legal trends and (following those trends) its grounding in developmental research and other empirical studies. What the literature has lacked until now is commentary on the Restatement and its utility by and for practitioners—professionals who work in the field and who deal with the law regulating children and families in their day-to-day work. This special issue of the Family Court Review (which the three of us, along with Clare Huntington, proposed, and then co-edited) begins to fill this gap. This issue brings together the perspectives of a judge, a prosecutor, public defenders, advocates in both the youth justice and family regulation fields, clinical and other law professors, and a developmental psychologist who is a leading expert on youth justice. Each contributor was invited to comment on the Restatement and suggest how it might influence their work and the field of law in which they work. The authors of the comments in this special issue are leaders in their fields. Together they offer an invaluable collection of thoughtful observations on the ways in which the Restatement of Children and the Law can be useful to professionals in legal practice and judging whose efforts focus on promoting the wellbeing of children and youth. An overview of the contributions shows how each provides insights into the Restatement and illuminates its value to a broad range of legal practitioners and scholars. As the contributors note, specific provisions of the Restatement as well as the project as a whole can have an impact.