Legal foundations of adolescents' rights and positive youth development

Abstract

Adolescents increasingly emerge as a unique demographic group, as they have been deemed as having their own needs and abilities as well as constituting a particularly important time period in the life course. The legal system, however, has yet to recognize the period. Instead, the legal system essentially recognizes two periods in the life course: childhood (generally under 18) and adulthood (generally over 18). In the United States, this lack of recognition is evident in the legal system's foundation, which is Constitutional law and the Supreme Court's interpretation of it through its jurisprudence. The Court has yet to provide a determinative approach to the adolescent period, but it certainly has sought to address the intricacies of the challenges that adolescents' needs pose for their development, their personal relationships, their families, and broader societal institutions. That jurisprudence generally seeks to determine when (and how) to treat adolescents as competent adults for some purposes and as incompetent minors for others. Although laws may be found to both embrace and reject the notion that adolescents are neither children nor adults, the Court has begun to accept the concept of adolescence as a unique developmental phase requiring a separate theoretical approach. That legal development, however, clearly remains in its infancy and its outcome is far from certain. As a result, those interested in understanding the law's approach to the adolescent period inevitably face the daunting task of delving into conceptually complex sets of laws guided by some foundational principles but pervasively driven by contextual dictates.