Reconceptualizing Children's Rights in International Development: Living Rights, Social Justice, Translations. By Karl Hanson and Olga Nieuwenhuys. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 302 pp. $99.00 cloth.

• Published date: 01 March 2015
• Date: 01 March 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12132

from the others, producing neither a “spontaneous order” as

FriedrichHayek might advocate nor a comprehensivemoral reading

as Ronald Dworkin would seek. Instead, we see many constitutions

operating through overlapping doctrines working to provide prin-

cipled guidance to discrete criminal justice practices. In this way, the

volume’s laudable and instructive attempt at more comprehensive

doctrinalcoverage matches the underlying fragmentation it studies.

Given the complexity of criminal justice, the plurality of applica-

ble constitutional provisions and meanings, and the uncertainty

inherent in future social and political developments that will shape

and be shaped by law, this volumemakes an important scholarly con-

tribution that opens dialogue on multiple doctrinal questions found

in the relationsbetween the Constitution’s presentand future.

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Reconceptualizing Children’s Rights in International Development:

Living Rights, Social Justice, Translations. By Karl Hanson and

Olga Nieuwenhuys. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2013. 302 pp. $99.00 cloth.

Reviewed by Maya Sabatello, Department of Psychiatry, Columbia

University

Although the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) was

adopted 25 years ago, questions about the meaning and scope of

the rights enshrined in it (and beyond) remain relevant in con-

temporary discourse on children’s rights. Numerous reports sug-

gest that violations of children’s rights are still rampant in much

of the world, with developing countries commonly being a major

target of criticism by children’s rights advocates. However, per-

haps the most challenging aspect of the CRC’s new legal order is

the concept of children’s agency. Notwithstanding the CRC’s clear

intention to shift the conceptualization of children from objects of

enculturation to subjects in their own right, and from passive to

active participants in their social, political, and familial milieu,

answering what to make of the “child’s voice” and how to incor-

porate it in the human rights discourse remains controversial.

The book’s editors, Karl Hanson and Olga Nieuwenhuys,

compiled a collection of essays to address this question from a

child-centered approach. Contrary to the view of the CRC as a

neutral legal reform, as often portrayed by children’s rights

290 Book Reviews