This chapter embraces the reasons for thinking that children possess children’s rights but suggests that these aims are currently better achieved through a duty-based approach to legal decision-making affecting children. My argument proceeds from the position that we are justified in seeing children as a “special case”, which means that children benefit from additional legal protection and priority beyond fundamental human rights that apply to all individuals alike. In deciding how best to recognise children as a special case, I suggest that three main competing approaches, children’s rights, welfare, and duties owed to children, should be seen as simply tools – language descriptors, ways of framing individual considerations, processes, and frameworks – for working with the same substantive content. Which approach we prefer or emphasise should depend on how well it guides decision-makers towards decisions that lead to or make more likely better outcomes for affected children. After briefly outlining why current conceptions of children’s rights cannot meet this test, I explain why a welfare or “best interests” approach is no more able to satisfy this objective than the alternatives. The remainder of the chapter is focused on exploring the potential of a duty-based approach. I argue that duty can have three roles: as a tool to give specificity and resolve conflicts in current rights- and welfare-based decision-making; as a theoretical framework of itself, focused on the decision-maker; and as the basis for anchoring a virtue-led view of the aim for legal decision-making affecting children – to enable children to flourish on their own terms. I conclude by exploring the practical implications of a duty-based argument and discuss three key examples, namely the Court of Appeal’s decision in Re A (Conjoined Twins: Surgical Separation) (2001), the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child, and private law disputes concerning children.
Published in Diduck, Peleg, and Reece, eds, Law in Society: Reflections on Children, Family, Culture and Philosophy (Essays in Honour of Michael Freeman) (Brill, 2015)
The pre-print version is available here.