Critical Youth Theory: Toward the Abolition of Infantilization and Adultification Under Law

Sarah Medina Camiscoli and Kia Turner present at Class Crits 2024.

In this paper, we introduce “Critical Youth Theory” to make a timely and necessary intervention in Critical Legal Studies (CLS).  Since 1977, scholars of CLS have transformed legal scholarship by developing a burgeoning body of work that interrogates the power of law and (re)production of legal epistemology. CLS has elevated “outsider jurisprudence” through subdisciplines such as Critical Race Theory (CRT) and its subsequent offshoots that have engaged impacted scholars. In alignment with CRT, we offer Critical Youth Theory (CYT) as both theory and method to alter the theoretical and practical landscape of legal studies and practice. We see CYT as providing a pathway to ensure that young people gain institutional power, autonomy, and material gains through a positive recognition of the historical and contemporary legal epistemologies of young people.  

We begin by reviewing the current state of youth under the law, examining young people’s critical position as citizens who can be taxed and spend their lives in prison without being able to vote. We analyze paradoxes in legal thinking and decision-making about young people and argue that they contribute to epistemological erasure and its attendant harms against youth.  We then position CYT as a necessary framework to recover young people’s ways of knowing as valid ways of making legal meaning that can rectify legal violence enacted against multiply marginalized youth. To do this, we lay out a brief historical genealogy of youth and the law, arguing that there is historical precedent in and beyond the United States where young people’s epistemologies and practices have directly contributed to legal transformation.  We then use these youth movements to deconstruct the normative assumptions of “youth” and “adolescence” that inform the double-bind of infantilization and adultification of young people under the law, drawing on critical youth studies within the field of education. Here, we underscore CYT’s examination of youth as a social construction as necessarily dovetailed with a simultaneous interrogation of other axes of oppression, with race taking on heightened significance in our analysis. In this way, CYT builds on the work of scholars within and beyond the field of education who have argued that youth is itself a social construct, one that can not be divorced from the project of “whiteness, masculinity, and domination.” 

Next, we turn our attention toward discussing CYT as a methodology.  In this section, we argue that CYT necessitates co-constructive and participatory methods that bring multiply-marginalized young people and their unique ways of knowing into legal knowledge production. We draw on education studies’ long history of youth participatory action research (YPAR) methods and other community-based research methods that maintain that bodies of scholarship are incomplete without the knowledges and perspectives of everyday people. In the legal field, scholars have begun to think through and research in ways that are attentive to the lives of marginalized communities in the burgeoning field of participatory law scholarship and movement law.  We assert that CYT can be operationalized through these emerging participatory methods in the law, as well as gesture toward other methodological approaches that align with CYT’s goals. 

To conclude, we lean on social movement analysis to demonstrate how an application of CYT to our legal system would produce material changes for youth across the country.  To do this, we examine three widespread legal issues affecting youth today: guns, prisons, and education.  For each of these issues, we elucidate how CYT would transform 1) youth’s access to institutional power, 2) material conditions, and 3) opportunities for youth autonomy.'

Contact:

Sarah Medina Camiscoli, Rutgers Law School Newark

medina.camiscoli@rutgers.edu 

Kia Turner, Stanford University Graduate School of Education

kcturner@stanford.edu