Book Review

In his engaging The Supreme Court and Juvenile Justice, political scientist Christopher P. Manfredi argues that Americans in the 1990s are still feeling the powerful and unintended consequences of a trilogy of Supreme Court decisions, Kent v. United States (1966), In re Gault (1967), and In re Winship (1970). In Gault, the most famous of these cases, Justice Abe Fortas announced that it was time for the "constitutional domestication" of the nation's juvenile courts and began this process by extending limited due process protection to offenders during adjudicatory hearings. Fortas believed that these protections would shield juveniles from unlimited judicial discretion, while still retaining the juvenile court's founding ideals of individualized treatment and rehabilitation that were embodied in the legal concept of parens patriae (the state as father/parent). Manfredi, however, claims that constitutional domestication instead undermined "the traditional assumptions of juvenile justice policy" and "facilitated legislative reform by unclogging the channels of political change" (176). Once under way, this reform process led to the criminalization of juvenile justice and the establishment of individual responsibility and retribution as its new twin ideals. Thus, Manfredi concludes that even court-ordered reform of a legal system, an area in which judges are experts, can be a risky business.	1
It should come as no surprise that The Supreme Court and Juvenile Justice primarily builds upon the social scientific literature concerned with litigation and social reform that stresses the shortcomings of courts to enact meaningful social change, including such influential works as Donald Horowitz's The Courts and Social Policy (1977) and Gerald Rosenberg's The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? (1991). Manfredi's first chapter on litigation and the dynamics of social reform, in fact, will serve as a good primer for readers, especially historians, unfamiliar with this growing body of scholarship. Particularly useful are his concise discussions of models of twentieth-century public interest litigation, epitomized by the strategies developed by the NAACP and ACLU, as well as his overview of "the nationalization of criminal procedure" by the Warren Court.	2
After constructing a solid theoretical foundation, Manfredi then lays out a compelling narrative of the rise and fall of the rehabilitative ideal in juvenile justice, which had legitimated the creation of specialized courts to hear the cases of dependent, neglected, and delinquent children. This ideal had also helped to shield juvenile courts from legal and political challenges, especially during the early twentieth century. He traces the origins of the rehabilitative ideal to the House of Refuge movement in the 1820s, finds its embodiment in the Illinois Juvenile Court Act of 1899, and dates its fall from grace to changing social conditions in the post-World War II era. His sketch of public perceptions of delinquency and the role of children in twentieth-century society is thin. Yet, he does provide a rewarding account of how postwar legal scholars and social scientists began to question the paternal assumptions of traditional juvenile justice. He concludes this part of the narrative with a 1964 speech delivered by Chief Justice Earl Warren to the National Council of Juvenile Court Judges. In this speech, Warren warned the judges that the Supreme Court would no longer tolerate their vast discretion over children in the name of parens patriae.	3
This historical overview of juvenile justice beautifully sets up the heart of his book, four chapters of insider's history complemented by extremely close readings of the briefs and opinions in the trilogy of cases that transformed American juvenile justice. Manfredi lucidly explains difficult legal concepts and, more importantly, reveals their significance. His analysis, for example, of the shifting rationale for these decisions from "selective incorporation" of the Bill of Rights to "fundamental fairness" is enlightening. Moreover, a series of tables and charts helps to untangle legal concepts as well as the scholarship brought to the court through amicus briefs. His minute attention to legal detail, for example, also reveals that Gault, which is best known as a children's rights case and is even the subject of a recent book for young adults, actually began in the Arizona courts as a parental rights case. This significant transformation suggests that scholars must be extremely careful when writing the history of children's rights not to forget how often parental rights are also involved in these cases. In addition, his findings also suggest that Gault has become a lens that distorts our readings of earlier decisions.	4
The final two chapters of this first-rate monograph sketch out the unintended consequences of constitutional domestication and provide a good summary of the wave of legislative activity that has "criminalized" juvenile justice and the scholarly assessment of this national trend. Although The Supreme Court and Juvenile Justice clearly has a great deal to offer specialists in juvenile justice, it should also interest scholars concerned more generally with twentieth-century law and governance because it helps to explain the unraveling of Progressive Era assumptions about state power and social welfare.	5
David S. Tanenhaus University of Nevada, Las Vegas

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