Curtailing Minors Constitutional Rights: Court Case Study

II. Justifications for Curtailing Minors’ Constitutional Rights In 1967, in In re Gault, the Court explicitly declared that, “neither the Fourteenth Amendment nor the Bill of Rights is for adults alone.” Gault inspired an explosion of children’s rights litigation. In the years that followed, the Court recognized children’s constitutional rights of due process, free speech, and reproductive choice. While children’s personhood is sufficient to qualify them as constitutional rights holders, “children’s rights have, from the outset, looked different from adults’ rights, and the Court has made some effort to account for these differences.” In general, the Court recognizes three justifications for the conclusion that the constitutional rights of children cannot be equated with those of adults: (1) the peculiar vulnerability of children; (2) their inability to make critical decisions in an informed, mature manner; and (3) the importance of the

Minnesota, the Court reiterated its earlier assertions about adolescent decisionmaking capacities, concluding that “The State has a strong and legitimate interest in the welfare of its young citizens, whose immaturity, inexperience, and lack of judgment may sometimes impair their ability to exercise their rights wisely” and that the state has a legitimate interest in “ensuring that the minor’s decision is knowing and intelligent.” The Hodgson Court did have access to ample social scientific literature supporting the claim that pregnant minors are no less competent than adults in their ability to make informed decisions about their medical care, including decisions about abortion. But the Court only cited the APA’s amicus brief twice—and only to support striking down the law’s two-parent consent requirement. The Court declined to question whether its assumptions about minors’ decision-making competencies were unfounded, even though the APA’s amicus brief provided evidence to suggest as