“Today, systemically marginalized youth face a crisis of belonging in democracy,” argue four co-authors of a new law review article titled “Youth Dignity Takings: How Book and Trans Bans Take Youth Property and Dignity” (Camiscoli, et al., 2024). The article was published in August 2024 in the inaugural issue of the Loyola Interdisciplinary Journal of Public Interest Law, a newly established academic journal with an interdisciplinary and narrative-based approach to public interest advocacy and education.
The article begins by noting that state and local lawmakers have proposed and enacted dehumanizing “bans” on books, curricula, bathrooms, sports, and healthcare for youth of color and LGBTQ+ youth at an alarming rate.
With a unique focus on the rights of young people, the authors observe that if students protest these bans, they may face exclusionary discipline or harassment from peers, school staff and others in the community.
If they concede, they may face indefinite deprivation of culturally sustaining classrooms and loss of equitable access to other school facilities and programs essential to their belonging and success in public education, such as bathrooms, libraries, extracurriculars and athletic programs, and health services.
In “Youth Dignity Takings,” co-authors Sarah M. Camiscoli, Paige Duggins-Clay, Maryam Salmanova and Ibtihal Chamakh argue that such bans constitute an unconstitutional “dignity taking” – a state action that takes property from a marginalized group and dehumanizes and infantilizes that group in the process.
The authors draw on their experiences as a legal scholar-practitioner, a movement lawyer and education justice advocate, a youth community legal worker and a law student-activist. They practice participatory law scholarship (López, 2023) and movement law (Akbar, et al., 2021) to urge legal advocates to consider new strategies for redressing the harms caused by classroom censorship, anti-LGBTQ+ policies, and other discriminatory practices targeting historically-marginalized youth.
“Each week, these young people lose individual freedoms, political accountability, and public resources while enduring dehumanizing white supremacist and adultist laws, rhetoric and administrative violence,” the authors write.
“For example, K-12 students remain the only group of people that the Constitution permits state government agents to physically abuse as a form of discipline without due process. The U.S. Constitution also deprives students of Fourth Amendment protection from unreasonable search and seizure by requiring only reasonable suspicion for a warrantless search. The precarious nature of their rights in schools means that young people, particularly gender expansive youth and youth of color, face unmatched levels of battery, assault and violations of privacy under the rule of law.”
To remedy this injustice, the authors build on constitutional law scholar Bernadette Atuahene’s framework of “dignity restoration,” arguing that legal processes should not only restore material losses taken from young people but also affirm young people’s humanity and reinforce their agency (2016).
By “reimagining property law, legal services, legal norms, lawyers and legal systems,” the authors advance a “freedom dream” of legal advocacy that “results in laws and norms that ensure youth of color and gender expansive youth belong and thrive under law and in society.”
We remain committed to transforming the educational trajectories of students deemed at risk through innovative, research-based interventions that lead students to become engaged, informed and thoughtful leaders.
The law review article is available online.
Resources
Akbar, A.A., Ashar, S.M., & Simonson, J. (April 2021). Movement Law. Stanford Law Review, Vol. 73.
Atuahene, B. (2016). Dignity Takings and Dignity Restoration: Creating a New Theoretical Framework for Understanding Involuntary Property Loss and the Remedies Required. Law & Social Inquiry, Vol 41, pp. 796-800.
Camiscoli, S.M., Duggins-Clay, P., Salmanova, M., and Chamakh, I. (2024). Youth Dignity Takings: How Book Bans and Trans Bans Take Youth Property and Dignity. Loyola Interdisciplinary Journal of Public Interest Law, Vol. 1.
López, R. (2023). Participatory Law Scholarship. Columbia Law Review, Vol 123.
[© 2024, IDRA. This article originally appeared in the August edition of the IDRA Newsletter. Permission to reproduce this article is granted provided the article is reprinted in its entirety and proper credit is given to IDRA and the author.]
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