PILA is delighted to announce a seminar, hosted jointly with the Irish Penal Reform Trust, on the experience of strategic juvenile justice litigation in the United States.
This seminar will hear from Marsha Levick co-founder of the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia, a nationally recognized leader in juvenile law in the US who has successfully litigated challenges to the state Department of Education's failure to provide pre-trial school-aged youth in county prisons with basic and special education; the Department of Public Welfare's failure to ensure the availability of foster care payments to eligible kinship care givers; a local detention center's failure to ensure the safety of a mentally ill resident; and a Pennsylvania statute denying Philadelphia adjudicated youth the opportunity to return to their regular public schools after completing residential placement.
Levick and Juvenile Law Center was one of the leading organizations to file an amicus brief against the juvenile death penalty in Roper v. Simmons, where the Supreme Court ultimately held the juvenile death penalty unconstitutional and was also centrally involved in the Luzerne County scandal where judges were found to have accepted bribes to commit children into juvenile detention.
Nationally, Ms. Levick has worked with the American Bar Association's special taskforce to develop standards for the prosecution of juveniles in the adult criminal justice system. She is an adjunct faculty member at both the University of Pennsylvania Law School and Temple University Beasley School of Law, where she teaches courses on Juvenile Justice and Appellate
Marsha will be in Ireland to support the establishment of a Child Law Clinic with Ursula Kilkelly at the Faculty of Law, University College Cork. The Child Law Clinic is an initiative supported by NAIRTL, the National Academy for the Integration of Research and Teaching and Learning.
This exciting event will take place at Distillery Building, Church St, Dublin 7 on 10 January 2011 at 5pm. To reserve your place contact Mary Gaffney at info@iprt.ie or tel: 01-8741400