The Rights of Children in the United States provides discussion on: the historical and contextual perspective on the rights of children; the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child; and the differing views on children's rights and competencies.

In 1962, a 15-year-old Arizona boy named Gerald Gault may or may not have made a lewd phone call to a neighbor. Gerald was arrested, prosecuted, removed from his parents’ custody, and sent to a juvenile prison, all without legal representation. Gerald’s mother’s outrage at the treatment of her son eventually propelled the case to the United States Supreme Court. With its sweeping 1967 decision in In re Gault, the Court revolutionized the American juvenile court system by finding that children charged with delinquency have a constitutional right to counsel. This anthology, which commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the Gault decision, blends, across its three parts, legal and historical analyses, oral history, and personal narrative to provide an overview of modern Supreme Court juvenile justice jurisprudence, the advocates and organizations that defend children in juvenile court, the role these lawyers have played in the fight for justice for accused children, and the contemporary challenges facing juvenile defenders and their clients. The authors are leading juvenile justice reformers, advocates, and scholars, all of whom have been deeply involved in shaping modern juvenile justice policy and practice and most of whom have represented children in juvenile court. This book is for everyone concerned about justice in America. The personal narratives about children in the system will intrigue students and academics, engage lay individuals who are interested in children’s rights, and guide professionals, legislators, and other policymakers involved in juvenile justice reform and criminology.

In Judgment and Mercy, Martin J. Siegel offers an insightful and compelling biography of Irving Robert Kaufman, the judge infamous for condemning Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to death for atomic espionage. In 1951, world attention fixed on Kaufman's courtroom as its ambitious young occupant stridently blamed the Rosenbergs for the Korean War. To many, the harsh sentences and their preening author left an enduring stain on American justice. But then the judge from Cold War central casting became something unexpected: one of the most illustrious progressive jurists of his day. Upending the simplistic portrait of Judge Kaufman as a McCarthyite villain, Siegel shows how his pathbreaking decisions desegregated a Northern school for the first time, liberalized the insanity defense, reformed Attica-era prisons, spared John Lennon from politically motivated deportation, expanded free speech, brought foreign torturers to justice, and more. Still, the Rosenberg controversy lingered. Decades later, changing times and revelations of judicial misconduct put Kaufman back under siege. Picketers dogged his footsteps as critics demanded impeachment. And tragedy stalked his family, attributed in part to the long ordeal. Instead of propelling him to the Supreme Court, as Kaufman once hoped, the case haunted him to the end. Absorbingly told, Judgment and Mercy brings to life a complex man by turns tyrannical and warm, paranoid and altruistic, while revealing intramural Jewish battles over assimilation, class, and patriotism. Siegel, who served as Kaufman's last law clerk, traces the evolution of American law and politics in the twentieth century and shows how a judge unable to summon mercy for the Rosenbergs nonetheless helped expand freedom for all.