ABA Center on Children and the Law

The American Bar Association’s Center on Children and the Law is staffing up, with the addition of four new attorneys to work on issues including kinship care and legal counsel for parents and children in child welfare cases.

An emboldened parent defense movement convened at a Ritz-Carlton near Washington, D.C., last week, intent to capitalize on recent policy victories and public attention. The goal? To reduce the number of parents they believe are unnecessarily separated from their kids by the child welfare system.

On Thursday, scores of attorneys, judges and other child protection professionals descended on Washington, D.C., for the American Bar Association’s National Conference on Parent Representation. The conference’s name is suggestive of the family justice revolution brewing within child welfare law.

Bill Grimm, a long-time attorney with the Oakland-based National Center for Youth Law (NCYL), passed away on April 2 after a year-long battle with brain cancer. He was 69. Over a 40-year career, Grimm helped forge change for many troubled child welfare systems across the country through trailblazing litigation and legislative advocacy, including in Maryland, Arkansas, Utah, Washington, Nevada and California, among others.

Bill Grimm, who has helped lead reform-prompting litigation against several state and county child welfare systems, has been awarded the Mark Hardin Award by the American Bar Association Center on Children and The Law.

The argument for a greater guarantee of lawyers in dependency court has strong grounding in legal circles. It is virtually inarguable that the interests of justice are better served with counsel than without it.

Danielle DeMaison woke before sunrise one foggy morning last April and loaded her two daughters into her 2013 Hyundai Santa Fe. Even though the cornstalk-lined roads around her little hamlet of Sanborn on the western edge of New York state were mostly empty, it took DeMaison four hours to get her biological and foster daughters to their separate schools.