What's Wrong with Children's Rights

Fiorello LaGuardia Professor of Clinical Law, NYU School of Law

Martin Guggenheim is Fiorello LaGuardia Professor of Clinical Law at NYU School of Law. He was for 15 years the director of Clincial and Acvocacy Programs at NYU and has taught there for more than 30 years. Guggenheim is currently President of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform and serves as a member of the board of directors of the Center for Family Representation, the Child Welfare Watch, and the board of advisors for the Administration for Children's Services.

Executive Director, Children’s Rights

Marcia Robinson Lowry is the founder and executive director of Children’s Rights. She has dedicated her legal career to protecting the rights of children. Formerly director of the Children's Rights Project of the New York Civil Liberties Union (1973–1979) and the American Civil Liberties Union (1979–1995), Lowry has a long history of reforming child welfare systems. She pioneered the first body of law to protect children in foster care, bringing increased attention and public scrutiny to systems that were all but ignored. Her work at Children’s Rights, which she founded in 1995, uses litigation or the threat of litigation in conjunction with national and local policy analysts, experts, and government officials to implement realistic, long-term solutions to change the lives of children. These efforts have created concrete changes in foster care systems such as more funding and resources, as well as improved management and better outcomes for children.

In 2000, Nina Bernstein highlighted Lowry’s work in New York City with the publication of The Lost Children of Wilder: An Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care. This book explores the background and aftermath of the landmark 1973 Wilder lawsuit Lowry filed against the City of New York’s foster care system.

Lowry is currently monitoring landmark child welfare reform settlements in New Jersey; Connecticut; the District of Columbia; New Mexico; Tennessee; Kansas City, Missouri; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She is also litigating to reform failing child welfare systems in Mississippi and Fulton and DeKalb Counties, Georgia.

Executive Director, Juvenile Law Center

Robert Schwartz co-founded the Juvenile Law Center in 1975 and has been its executive director since 1982. With nearly 30 years at JLC, Schwartz is a national leader in advocating for children’s rights and has extensive experience in all areas of juvenile law.

In his career at JLC, Schwartz has represented dependent and delinquent children in Pennsylvania juvenile and appellate courts; brought class-action litigation over institutional conditions and probation functions; testified in Congress before House and Senate committees; and spoken in over 25 states on matters related to children and the law.

Schwartz’s career has included fighting nationally and internationally for juvenile rights. From 1992–98 he was chair of the Juvenile Justice Committee of the American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Section. In 1993 he visited South Africa to help develop a legal system for children. In 1993 he also co-authored the American Bar Association’s report, America’s Children at Risk; and in 1995 he helped author a follow-up report on youth's access to quality lawyers, A Call for Justice. Schwartz is on the Board of the National Juvenile Defender Center that was established by the ABA Juvenile Justice Center, Youth Law Center, and Juvenile Law Center as a result of A Call for Justice.

Schwartz is a member of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice. As part of the Network, he co-edited Youth on Trial: A Developmental Perspective on Juvenile Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2000). From 1996–99 he was a gubernatorial appointee to the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency. Since 1991 he has been a gubernatorial appointee to the Commission’s Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Committee, which distributes federal funds in Pennsylvania and advises the governor regarding juvenile justice policy. Schwartz in 2005 became chair of the Advisory Committee to the Children’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch.