legal counsel

After a long career leading family representation policy for the American Bar Association, Mimi Laver is returning to Philadelphia.

A campaign is underway to extend the right to an attorney to children and parents nationwide caught up in the child welfare system.

The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions approved a bill that could provide the first federal requirement of legal counsel to parents and children in child welfare cases, though there appeared to be some discussion of further negotiations on that before a vote of the full Senate.

Iowa aims to find out if giving families in crisis early access to lawyers would improve outcomes, rather than being assigned a public defender only after a child is removed and enters the foster care system. 

During a virtual town hall last week, parents asked gut-wrenching questions to child welfare leadership. “When can I see my kids again?” “I was having unsupervised visits with them. Why can’t they come live with me?”

For the past few weeks, I’ve been reading transcripts from child protective hearings. Hundreds of pages of transcripts. I’ve seen examples of clear legal errors. I’ve read many lines of parents’ lawyers grumbling and complaining.

The New York City Council is considering a new frontier in establishing rights for parents accused of child abuse and neglect, over objections from Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration and child protective caseworkers.

Each fall, students in the University of Michigan Law School’s Child Welfare Appellate Clinic represent parents in termination of parental rights (TPR) appeals. We don’t cherry pick our cases for ones we’re likely to win.

There is much work left to do, but the number of states that fail to legally support children in child welfare cases has significantly declined in the past decade. These are the findings of the fourth iteration of A Child’s Right to Counsel, the periodic national report card on counsel for children published in partnership with the First Star Institute and the Children’s Advocacy Institute (CAI).