Reimagining Children's Equality: Nancy Dowd

An event co-hosted by Cambridge Family Law and the Cambridge Socio-Legal Group at the Faculty of Law on 12 November 2019.

Speaker: Professor Nancy Dowd, David H. Levin Chair in Family Law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law.

Professor Dowd will present the core thesis and arguments of her recent book, Reimagining Equality: A New Deal for Children of Color (NYU Press 2018). She argues that children’s equality must include developmental equality, meaning that each child should be supported to their full developmental capacity. She will present the three essential parts of the book and then hope to engage in discussion and feedback. She will focus most of her presentation on Part III of the book, which melds the developmental and legal implications of children’s inequalities and hierarchies among children. She will suggest strategies for change, which include three possibilities: using existing statutory frameworks, constitutional litigation and affirmative, comprehensive legislation that she calls a New Deal for Children, borrowing from the New Deal of the 1930s in the US.

Professor Dowd is the David H. Levin Chair in Family Law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law, and an affiliate of the Anita Zucker Center. She served as Interim Director and Director of the Center on Children and Families at the UF law school from 2007-2015. She currently is a Distinguished Guest Professor at Aalborg University, Denmark, for 2018-2020, and in 2017 was the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Public International Law at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law and Lund University, Sweden. Her research focuses on social justice issues that link family law, juvenile law, constitutional law, critical race and gender analysis, and social change theories. She is the author of eight books and over 50 articles.

For more information about the Cambridge Family Law Centre, see the website at:

https://www.family.law.cam.ac.uk/