Children’s Rights and the Canon Law: Law and Practice in Later Medieval England

The twentieth century witnessed a tidal wave of concern for the legal rights of children.1 The tide shows no sign of receding. An international movement, it led to the adoption of the Declaration of Geneva on the Rights of the Child in 1924 and, in 1989, to the enactment of a United Na tions Convention on the Rights of the Child. By the spring of 2006, the 1989 Convention had been ratified by 192 states.2 Treaties and legislation have been more than matched by academic activity. Scholarship about the rights of children has become an active, and sometimes contentious, field of inquiry.3 The importance of family stability, the legitimacy of inter vention by the government, and the ultimate sources of children’s status in the law have all been the subject of exploration, doubt, and debate.