Susan Etta Keller (Western State College of Law) has posted The Double-Edged Rhetoric of Parental Rights: Conflicts between Freedom and Control in Cases Concerning Transgender Youth (21 Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy 2026) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This Article examines the rhetorical structures courts and advocates deploy in two distinct lines of cases adjudicating parental rights claims affecting transgender youth: cases challenging state bans on gender-affirming care, and cases challenging school policies supportive of transgender students. Although the legal basis for the parental rights claims in each set of cases is the same—substantive due process rights under the Fourteenth Amendment—the alignment of parental interests with those of their children diverges between the two sets. In the gender-affirming care cases, parents act in concert with their children’s expressed interests; in the school policy cases, parents seek to override them.
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Lawrence Solum