This book highlights the importance of law, policy and rights in improving children's lives, combining historical analysis and human rights law.

The Oxford Handbook of Children and the Law presents cutting-edge interdisciplinary scholarship on a broad range of topics covering the life course of humans from before birth to adulthood, by leading scholars in each area. Authors present and analyze the law and science pertaining to reproduction; prenatal life (including fetal exposure to toxic substances and abortion); parentage (including biology-based rights, background checks on birth parents, adoption, ART, and surrogacy); infant development; child maltreatment (including corporal punishment and religious defences to abuse and neglect); the child protection system and foster care; child custody disputes between parents; schooling (including financing, resegregation, religious expression in public schools, at-risk students, special education, regulating private schools, and homeschooling); delinquency; minimum-age laws; and child advocacy. It is an essential resource for scholars and professionals interested in the intersection of children and the law.

Children's rights law is a relatively young but rapidly developing discipline. The U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, the field's core legal instrument, is the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history. Yet, like children themselves, children's rights are often relegated to the margins in mainstream legal, political, and other discourses, despite their application to approximately one-third of the world's population and every human being's first stages of life. Now thirty years old, the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) signalled a definitive shift in the way that children are viewed and understood--from passive objects subsumed within the family to full human beings with a distinct set of rights. Although the CRC and other children's rights law have spurred positive changes in law, policies, and attitudes toward children in numerous countries, implementation remains a work in progress. We have reached a state in the evolution of children's rights in which we need more critical evaluation and assessment of the CRC and the large body of children's rights law and policy that this treaty has inspired. We have moved from conceptualizing and adopting legislation to focusing on implementation and making the content of children's rights meaningful in the lives of all children. This book provides a critical evaluation and assessment of children's rights law, including the CRC. With contributions from leading scholars and practitioners from around the world, it aims to elucidate the content of children's rights law, explore the complexities of implementation, and identify critical challenges and opportunities for children's rights law.

This handbook examines the meanings, implications, and transformative potential of a child-rights approach for school psychology. It focuses on the school community, in which psychology is committed to promoting well-being, learning, and development of all children. The handbook begins with an overview of the 1989 United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and explores main themes such as, survival, protection, development, participation, and nondiscrimination. Chapters provide guidance in promoting and protecting child rights when dealing with critical issues relevant to the school community, including well-being, freedom from violence, and access to high quality education. In addition, chapters analyze and offer recommendations for child rights applications within the roles and responsibilities of school psychologists. The handbook concludes with future directions for achieving a child-rights approach for school psychology. Topics featured in this handbook include: The current status of child rights in the international community. Accountability for child rights by school psychology. Collaborative home, school, and community practices aimed at promoting family support. Protecting child rights within the realm of competitive sports. CRC and school-based intervention programming. Promoting child rights through school leadership. Applying child rights-respecting research to the study of psychological well-being. The International Handbook on Child Rights and School Psychology is a must-have resource for researchers, scientist-practitioners, clinicians, and graduate students in child and school psychology, educational policy and politics, social work, public health, and other school-based or child-serving mental health disciplines.

In recent decades, advances in biomedical research have helped save or lengthen the lives of children around the world. With improved therapies, child and adolescent mortality rates have decreased significantly in the last half century. Despite these advances, pediatricians and others argue that children have not shared equally with adults in biomedical advances. Even though we want children to benefit from the dramatic and accelerating rate of progress in medical care that has been fueled by scientific research, we do not want to place children at risk of being harmed by participating in clinical studies. Ethical Conduct of Clinical Research Involving Children considers the necessities and challenges of this type of research and reviews the ethical and legal standards for conducting it. It also considers problems with the interpretation and application of these standards and conduct, concluding that while children should not be excluded from potentially beneficial clinical studies, some research that is ethically permissible for adults is not acceptable for children, who usually do not have the legal capacity or maturity to make informed decisions about research participation. The book looks at the need for appropriate pediatric expertise at all stages of the design, review, and conduct of a research project to effectively implement policies to protect children. It argues persuasively that a robust system for protecting human research participants in general is a necessary foundation for protecting child research participants in particular.

Current Legal Issues, like its sister volume Current Legal Problems (now available in journal format), is based upon an annual colloquium held at Univesity College London. Each year leading scholars from around the world gather to discuss the relationship between law and another discipline of thought. Each colloquium examines how the external discipline is conceived in legal thought and argument, how the law is pictured in that discipline, and analyses points of controversy in the use, and abuse, of extra-legal arguments within legal theory and practice. Law and Childhood Studies, the fourteenth volume in the Current Legal Issues series, offers an insight into the state of law and childhood studies scholarship today. Focussing on the inter-connections between the two disciplines, it addresses the key issues informing current debates.