Section 4 Constitutionaland StatutoryBasesofAbuseandNeglectLaw
Library | Juvenile Law 2011 |
Child maltreatment law rests on a delicate balance that implicates substantive due process and other basic constitutional guarantees. The United States Supreme Court has articulated a Fourteenth Amendment substantive due process right to family integrity, which includes
the right of parents to raise their children as they see fit without unreasonable state interference. The seminal decision is Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390, 399 (1923), which held that Fourteenth Amendment liberty guarantees “the right of the individual . . . to marry, establish a home and bring up children . . . .” In Pierce v. Society of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus & Mary, 268 U.S. 510, 534–35 (1925), the Court reaffirmed the due process liberty of parents to “direct the upbringing and education of children under their control.” Prince v. Massachusetts, 321 U.S. 158, 166 (1944) (citation omitted), was even more explicit about the parental role in children’s lives:
[T]he custody, care and nurture of the child reside first in the parents, whose primary function and freedom include preparation for obligations the state can neither supply nor hinder. And it is in recognition of this that [Meyer and Pierce] have respected the private realm of family life which the state cannot enter.
The Court has consistently reaffirmed the substantive due process liberty interest recognized in Meyer, Pierce, and Prince, which reflects “perhaps the oldest of the fundamental liberty interests recognized by” the Court. Troxel v. Granville, 530 U.S. 57, 65 (2000) (plurality opinion). In Stanley v. Illinois, 405 U.S. 645 (1972), for example, the Court struck down a state dependency statute that made children of unwed fathers wards of the state upon the mother’s death without offering the father an opportunity for a fitness hearing. Stanley specified that “the interest of a parent in the companionship, care, custody, and management of his or her children ‘come[s] to this Court with a momentum for respect lacking when appeal is made to liberties which derive merely from shifting economic arrangements.’” Id. at 651. Stanley held that the parents’ substantive due process liberty interest extends to “family relationships unlegitimized by a marriage ceremony.” Id.
Two years after Stanley, Cleveland Board of Education v. LaFleur, 414 U.S. 632, 639–40 (1974), reiterated that “freedom of personal choice in matters of marriage and family life is one of the liberties protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” The Court has also invoked constitutional privacy doctrines to sustain the integrity of family decision‑making. See, e.g., Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973); Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972); Griswold v. Conn., 381 U.S. 479 (1965).
Soon after Stanley and LaFleur, the United States Supreme Court reaffirmed that a “natural parent’s ‘desire for and right to “the companionship, care, custody, and management of his or her children”’ is an interest far more precious than any property right.” Santosky v. Kramer, 455 U.S. 745, 758–59 (1982) (quoting Lassiter v. Dep’t of Soc. Servs., 452 U.S. 18...
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