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Established in 1975, Juvenile Law Center initially represented individual youth in a wide range of court and administrative proceedings throughout Southeastern Pennsylvania. Over time, Juvenile Law Center expanded its advocacy for children across Pennsylvania and, by the early 1990s, was addressing child welfare and justice system reform nationwide.

Today, Juvenile Law Center plays a national leadership role in shaping legal advocacy on behalf of children in the child welfare and justice systems to promote fairness, prevent harm, secure access to appropriate services, and ensure a smooth transition from adolescence to adulthood. We target youth who are between 10 and 21 years of age and are among society’s most vulnerable—most likely to be mislabeled, ignored, harmed, or scarred for life by systems that are supposed to help them.

Juvenile Law Center works to protect and advance children’s rights in courts, legislatures, and executive agencies. Our strategies include litigation, appellate advocacy and submission of amicus (friend-of-the-court) briefs, policy reform, public education, training, and strategic communications. We strive to ensure that laws, policies, and practices affecting youth are rooted in research and consistent with children’s unique developmental characteristics, as well as reflective of international human rights values.

Juvenile Law Center’s advocacy has contributed to several landmark United States Supreme Court rulings, including:

Eliminating the death penalty for juveniles (Roper v. Simmons, 2005)
Eliminating juvenile life without parole sentences in non-homicide cases (Graham v. Florida, 2010)
Finding that age is relevant in determining whether minors can reasonably believe that they are “in custody” and therefore subject to a Miranda warning (D.B. v. North Carolina, 2011)
Ending mandatory life without parole sentences for juveniles in homicide cases (Miller v. Alabama, 2012)

Juvenile Law Center also played a central role in exposing the Luzerne County, Pennsylvania “kids-for-cash” scandal, where the rights of thousands of children were violated by then juvenile court judge Mark Ciavarella—the children were quickly adjudicated delinquent (found guilty) and often sent to a for-profit detention center that was accused of providing cash kickbacks to the judge. The juvenile court scandal made national and international headlines, and is believed to be the most egregious judicial scandal in the history of our legal system.

For more information about Juvenile Law Center, visit www.jlc.org.

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