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Watkins, John C. Jr.

About the author: John C. Watkins, Jr. is the founding chair of the Department of Criminal Justice, College of Arts & Sciences at The University of Alabama. Watkins holds a J.D. degree from The University of Alabama, an M.S. degree in criminology from Florida State University, and an LL.M. in criminal law from Northwestern University. He has served as an appellate law clerk on the Supreme Court of Alabama and on the Fifth United States Circuit Court of Appeals, and has chaired the Committee on Correctional Institutions and Procedures of the Alabama State Bar.

Selected Cases on Juvenile Justice in the Twentieth Century
1999 0-7734-7902-3
This work is a collection of 78 appellate decisions in juvenile law that span the range of judicial opinion in this field during the 20th century. The work is not arranged in the typical law school casebook style by subject or topical heading, but rather by chronological date from 1905 to 1998. This arrangement gives the reader a sense of the flow of judicial opinion in juvenile justice from the court’s earliest decisions expounding the uniqueness of the juvenile court and its radical break with the criminal law and the punishing sanctions of 19th-century penology. In all, these cases reflect a century of caselaw that exhibits both contradiction and promise – a contradiction between the means-end role of juvenile law in the United States and a promise held out for a court seeking to come to grips with what many see as a rising tide of teen and sub-teen predatory criminality.