The Relationship Rights of Children ‐ by James G. Dwyer

The Relationship Rights of Children. James G. Dwyer. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2006. 378 pp. ISBN 0-521-86224-8. $55.00 (hardback). James Dwyer's book argues with great detail and passion for a child-centered approach in law and policy. He aims to move beyond the general principle that public policy should grant children legal rights and consideration, to discussing how to implement these principles. Dwyer's analysis is radical in that he likens children with other groups who have been denied rights. He explains that "the normative principles that the historically most privileged and empowered group developed for itself" should be broadened to "groups of persons who historically were excluded, who historically were treated as not counting but now must be treated as counting" and includes children in those groups (p. 69). He presents children as lacking power and posits tiiat the state should grant them more concrete rights. The use of a rights discourse is powerful, and the question of whether granting children additional rights will increase their well-being deserves consideration. Nevertheless, the invocation of a rights framework suffers from at least one serious flaw. Dwyer does not acknowledge that children are fundamentally different from other people who lack power because their social exclusion is transient; children grow up and into the dominant group, unlike other marginalized persons who cannot shed their race, gender, or disability. Chapters 1 and 2 outline why children should have rights and what relationship rights they currently have, particularly in matters of parentage, custody, and adoption. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 define relationship rights for competent and incompetent adults in comparison to children and use political theory to explore why adults maintain personal relationships. Dwyer defines relationship rights for competent adults as the right to form connections with others in some way (rather than the right to engage in any particular behaviors in those relationships or to receive recognition for them) and as predicated on mutuality. In contrast, parental rights are forced on children and legal custodians maintain the right to limit relationships between children and others. Dwyer's discussion of the almost unlimited nature of relationships between adults provides groundwork for his core argument that relationship rights could be extended to children. Chapters 7 and 8 provide a framework to implement children's relationship rights including reforms to parentage laws, legal rules governing inadequate parenting, and laws regulating children's relationships with persons who are not legal parents. The core strength and weakness of this book lie in its very goal: that the law should ascribe to children rights equivalent, though not identical to those granted to adults, which would require substantial changes in how the legal system treats children. The methodical presentation of this argument and philosophical underpinnings of it are provocative. At the same time, the thesis requires the reader to imagine a world where the rule of law is as influential as the experience of law in people's daily lives and to believe that the law operates in neutral and equal ways - or choose not to care when it does not. This can be seen in Dwyer's proposal to reform law so that parental rights would not be automatically granted to biological parents. This would not "absolutely disqualify anyone from parenmood, but rather requires certain biological parents - that is, biological parents manifesting certain characteristics or circumstances - to petition for legal parenthood as to particular children to demonstrate that making diem the legal parents of their offspring is likely to be better on the whole for the child than would be bestowing legal parenthood on other available persons" (pp. …