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"This powerful and deeply researched critique is coupled with a concise agenda for change that would dramatically shrink the role for courts in family life. The End of Family Court should be required reading for social scientists, historians, and legal scholars... Spinak's compact recommendations for abolition also provide a concrete and valuable roadmap... for families, activists, and policy makers."
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"Spinak gives us all a satisfyingly detailed and clear policy roadmap toward abolition... But Spinak’s book is not merely a set of crucial policy prescriptions, nor is it only a clarion call for abolishing the court. It presents a deep history of the constant reinvention of the idea at the heart of family court... Fully exploring and explicating this history makes the task ahead seems almost impossibly daunting. But maybe, just maybe, if power shifts, so will the idea and so will the court."
- Journal of Law and Political Economy
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“What would an American legal system look like…without a juvenile court… a court which holds out the promise of ameliorative services…[but]never quite making good that promise? Spinak
finds a court which casts a wide net, a court which insists on broad statutory grounds to include swaths of children and parents in its reach, with a punitive approach to addressing human behavior…she successfully challenges the conventional wisdom of the benefits of the juvenile court as a social court in provocative ways.”
(Link above leads to free download of review. To access, click on your state and input email)
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"Spinak argues in favor of dramatically reducing juvenile courts. Well-written and accessible, professionals and general readers will appreciate this incisive review by a juvenile-court expert."
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" Jane Spinak is an excellent writer, scholar, teacher, and advocate. She expertly weaves the reader through the history, growth, and intended purpose of family courts, helping us to understand how the courts have taken an unfortunate paternalistically oppressive path—using their great power in a way that too often inflicts great harm on the very children and families that the court is intended to help."
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"By tracing the origins and persistence of the Great Idea behind the family court—that judges can save children by fixing them and their families—Jane Spinak shows how the court not only has failed to achieve its asserted therapeutic mission, but also has inflicted tremendous harm on its presumed beneficiaries. The End of Family Court makes a compelling case that dismantling the family court is a critical part of abolishing family policing and radically reimagining care for children without destructive state interventions."
"An original and striking contribution to the interdisciplinary field of child welfare and juvenile justice. Spinak provides the most compelling abolitionist argument to date."
~David Tanenhaus, James E. Rogers Professor of History and Law, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
"This fascinating and important book is much more than the history of juvenile court. It is arefreshing – and powerful – critique of an institution that has never achieved anything close to itspurported aspirations. Instead, as Jane Spinak shows, the one accomplishment juvenile court andits defenders have achieved is to fend off countless critiques that it doesn’t deserve to survive.But the evidence amassed by Spinak in this book should lead us all to the conclusion shereaches: now is the time to close down this institution and stop harming the families and childrenthat is its legacy."
"Important and original. The book’s greatest strength is that it considers and interrogates both the juvenile justice and the child welfare aspects of today’s family court. This distinguishes Spinak’s work from almost all other previous scholarship in the area, and it allows Spinak to explore and critique the common themes and assumptions that animate these two related areas of law and practice."
~Jana Singer, co-author of Divorced from Reality: Rethinking Family Dispute Resolution
"This is a compelling and important read from an advocate, ally, and scholar with forty years of experience representing children and families in New York City. Her solutions for shrinking and ultimately dismantling the court draw explicitly from abolitionist theory and elevate the lessons learned from community activists most harmed."
~Kristin Henning, author of The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth
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Pre-Publication Praise
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