Constitutional Fidelity Through Children’s Rights

In 1967, the Supreme Court decided the landmark case of In re Gault, which famously declared that “neither the Fourteenth Amendment nor the Bill of Rights is for adults alone.”¹ This important step forward in the recognition of children’s constitutional rights, however, was immediately followed by a serious misstep: In defining children’s due process rights, the Court limited its universe of options to those specific rights already afforded to adults. The Court asked “Which adult procedural rights should we extend to children?” rather than asking, more basically, how to achieve the due process value of “fundamental fairness” for children.