Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Nevada Law Journal

Abstract

The article of Professor Barry Feld’s that provides the foundation for this special issue of the Nevada Law Journal—My Life in Crime: An Intellectual History of the Juvenile Court—chronicles the transformation of the juvenile justice system over the course of the past five decades. Feld is certainly the right person to tell this story. He is perhaps the leading scholar in juvenile justice of his generation. And, probably more than any other scholar, his scholarship has had a direct impact on juvenile court practice. He has been a prosecutor, law professor, researcher, commission member, and scholar. He was among the most radical critics of juvenile justice for most of his career, loudly calling for its abolition when most advocates for children were too afraid of what might happen if juvenile court were abolished. In this response to his article, I will tell a different—but closely related— story. I will look at the transformation that Feld himself went through in his views of the juvenile justice system. This is a story that allows us to glean some important insights about the nature of the juvenile justice system and why it evolved in the ways it did. By looking at the juvenile court’s history through the lens of its foremost chronicler, we can see the extent to which the court has been shaped by judges’, lawyers’, legislators’, and scholars’ assumptions about adolescents and their families.

First Page

371

Volume

17

Publication Date

2017

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