Child-centered jurisprudence is the central jurisprudential project of TCMP.
It asks courts, lawmakers, lawyers, scholars, parents, and citizens to examine family law from the standpoint of the child as well as the adults.
Traditional family-law litigation is procedurally organized around adult parties.
A petitioner files. A respondent answers. The court adjudicates.
But children may experience some of the most significant consequences of the judgment even though they did not initiate the proceeding and ordinarily exercise little control over it
Child-centered jurisprudence begins by asking:
Only then does it ask what legal intervention is justified.
This approach does not mean that every marriage must continue regardless of circumstances.
It does not require children to remain in dangerous homes.
It does not subordinate legitimate protection from abuse, violence, neglect, abandonment, or serious harm.
Instead, it rejects the opposite assumption: that because adults possess interests concerning marital dissolution, the child’s interests can automatically be treated as derivative or secondary.
Child-centered jurisprudence reaches beyond questions of divorce.
TCMP’s long-term objective is to contribute to the development of a coherent body of scholarship and legal reasoning in which the dignity and lawful interests of children occupy their proper place in family jurisprudence.
