ABSTRACT
The work inches along and the setbacks are many, but over time a resilient group of juvenile defense professionals has emerged, and they will continue to have a strong voice and will drive practice and policy reforms moving forward. In 1974, juvenile justice professionals celebrated the promise of the newly enacted Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA) and then watched it become unduly and unfairly politicized in the succeeding decades over and over again. All professional organizations and agencies have conferences and meetings, but there is something strangely different and uniquely special about the Juvenile Defender Leadership Summit. Children face dual injustices in the system when both their civil rights and due process rights are violated. So many children are funneled into the juvenile court pipeline for what is arguably normative adolescent behavior in most instances. Future work needs to target state and local action in order to ensure that the right to counsel for children is fulfilled.
