ABSTRACT
Children and youth provide practical and theoretical problems for the liberalist criminal jurisprudence of western modernity. Hobbes1 founded modem political liberalism upon three sources: (i) the ethics of selfassertion; (ii) an agreement that the political and legal institutions of civil society must be legitimated by secular rational discourses concerning the human condition and not traditional values; (iii) the acknowledgment that ‘modem’ institutions and societies were artefacts, products of the social and cultural energies of humans, and not a reflection of any ‘natural law or design’ independent of human volition and logical analysis.
