Adolescents and Constitutional Law, 1st ed. 2019 Regulating Social Contexts of Development Advancing Responsible Adolescent Development Series

This textbook offers a foundation for understanding adolescents? rights by articulating the complexity, breadth, and challenging nature of laws regulating adolescents. It showcases the Supreme Court?s key interpretations of the Constitution as it relates to adolescents? rights. Chapters examine relevant legal systems and the social contexts that legal systems control. In addition, chapters discuss constitutional issues and their nuances through actual cases that often offer alternative interpretations of constitutional rules. The textbook guides readers through both well accepted and often ignored conceptions of adolescents? rights. It offers readers unfamiliar with the law the tools they need to understand the importance of adolescents? constitutional rights and how they can contribute to developing them.

Topics featured in this text include: 

• The role of parents and family systems in conceptualizing adolescents? rights.
• The complexities of providing health care to adolescents.
• Religious freedom and adolescents? rights relating to religion.
• The flaws of child welfare systems.
• The challenge of developing rights specifically for juveniles and delinquent youth.
• Juvenile court systems and the differential treatment of adolescents.
• The difference between the juvenile court system and the criminal court system.
• Adolescents? media rights.

Adolescents and Constitutional Law is an essential textbook for graduate students as well as a must-have reference for researchers/professors and related professionals in developmental psychology, juvenile justice/youth offending, social work, psychology and law, family studies, constitutional law, and other interrelated disciplines.

Roger J.R. Levesque, J.D. (Columbia Law School), Ph.D. (Psychology, the University of Chicago), is professor of criminal justice and (affiliate) law at Indiana University and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Youth and Adolescence. Prior to his current faculty position, he was Professor of Psychology and Law at the University of Arizona. Dr. Levesque's research focuses on the legal regulation of families and the nature of children/adolescents' rights. In addition to having published numerous journal articles, Dr. Levesque is the author of thirteen books (and editor of one) dealing mainly with the nature family life and the laws that shape our intimate lives. His recent texts include The science and law of school segregation and diversity (Oxford 2017); Adolescence, privacy and the law: A developmental science perspective (Oxford 2016) and Adolescence, discrimination, and the law: Addressing dramatic shifts in equality jurisprudence (NYU 2015). His book Adolescents, Media, and the Law (Oxford University Press in 2007) won the outstanding book award from the American Law/Psychology Association and another, Not by Faith Alone: Religion, Law and Adolescence (NYU 2002) won the Society for the Study of Adolescence 2004 best authored book award. He also is editor of the five-volume Encyclopedia of Adolescence (2^nd ed.) (Springer 2018).

Provides an overview of how the legal system approaches adolescents’ rights

Introduces key social domains involving adolescents’ rights in the criminal justice system

Presents multiple views of adolescents’ rights through leading Supreme Court cases

Exposes striking gaps in the development of adolescents’ rights in the juvenile justice system

Lays the foundation for developing adolescents’ rights in the justice system