New Article Spotlight: The Child Welfare Exception to the 4th Amendment

Duke CrimProf Doriane Lamblet Coleman has published Storming the Castle to Save the Children: The Ironic Costs of a Child Welfare Exception to the Fourth Amendment in the William & Mary Law Review. The abstract: "This article first sets out the child welfare system's  assumption that there is a child welfare exception to the Fourth Amendment and then describes the ways it is used to facilitate  child maltreatment investigations. It goes on to analyze the  validity of this assumption according to current Fourth  Amendment doctrine, including the special needs "administrative"  exception. (This analysis may be particularly useful to both  family/children's law scholars as well as to Fourth Amendment  scholars, as it examines all of the state and federal appellate  cases addressing the subject, and provides a most up-to-date  evaluation of the Supreme Court's special needs doctrine.)  Finally, the article makes the normative argument that a child  welfare exception under any guise is unreasonable because it is  both unnecessary to accomplish the desired ends and causes harm  to more children than it helps." The paper is available on SSRN at:           http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=875432