Children in Disasters

Earlier this month, I attended the annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools. Partly because the meeting was in New Orleans, the Section on Children and the Law organized a day-long program, "Meeting the Needs of Children During Times of Crisis: Hurricane Katrina and Beyond."

One speaker (Anna Williams Shavers) remarked that disasters have a more severe impact on people already disadvantaged or suffering injustice, and disasters can also serve to reveal existing injustice. Her focus was public education in New Orleans -- but the same is true in Haiti. The natural disaster is hitting hard in a community already suffering from poverty and years of unstable governments, and the disaster is bringing the underlying situation to the world's attention.

Here are some publications related to the AALS program:

• Children, Law, and Disasters: What We Learned from Katrina and the Hurricanes of 2005 (a project of the ABA and the Univ. of Houston), KF3735 .C45 2009 at Classified Stacks


• symposium on Hurricane Katrina, 31 Thurgood Marshall Law Review 327-572 (2006), available on HeinOnline -- table of contents here.


• Kristi L. Bowman, Rebuilding Schools, Rebuilding Communities: The Civic Role of Mississippi's Public Schools after Hurricane Katrina (2008). MSU Legal Studies Research Paper No. 06-10. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1135309


• Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, Treated Like Trash: Juvenile Detention in New Orleans Before, During, and After Hurricane Katrina.


• Meghan Halley & Abigail English, Center for Adolescent Health & the Law, Health Care for Homeless Youth: Policy Options for Improving Access (2008)


• Left Behind: The Story of New Orleans Public Schools (a new documentary, not yet available on campus or in Netflix)