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Abstract: For more than a century, our society has struggled with what to do with young adults who commit crimes and fall just outside the rehabilitative promise of the juvenile court. Recent advancements in the juvenile law movement have begun to change that, spilling over into a broader emerging adult justice movement now gaining momentum across the country. Jurisdictions are experimenting with programs and policies aimed at making prosecutions and punishments less punitive and more rehabilitative for emerging adults, or those between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. These efforts rest on a powerful developmental foundation forged in juvenile law: that emerging adults, like children, possess the developmental traits that reduce their culpability and, more importantly, give them a greater capacity for change.
While this modern movement has been spurred by state and local experimentation, this Article argues that state and local action alone cannot sustain it. Drawing on lessons from the juvenile law movement, which provided the conceptual bridge for this modern effort, it argues that the federal government must help create the structural foundations to sustain and evolve this movement over time. This Article begins the work of developing a theory of emerging adult federalism, analyzing the theoretical and practical challenges of federal involvement and setting forth concrete proposals to support and sustain the emerging adult justice movement.
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