Reinventing “Youth” in Socio-Legal Studies

Abstract The social category of “youth” occupies liminal space with blurred boundaries between “childhood” and “adulthood.” Dominant modes of socio-legal inquiry into youth typically yield adult-centered, criminological accounts that place adult interests and perspectives at the core of their analyses, focusing ultimately on remedies to quell troubled adolescents and suppress disruptive delinquents. Youth-centered accounts, by contrast, locate young people as agents negotiating the contradictory expectations of adults and their institutions while forging socio-legal orders of their own making. This review essay draws from six key works on youth published over the past century—Kathryn Abrams’s Open Hand, Close Fist: Practices of Undocumented Organizing in a Hostile State , James Coleman’s The Adolescent Society: The Social Life of the Teenager and Its Impact on Education , Nikki Jones’s Beyond Good and Ghetto: African American Girls and Inner-City Violence , C. J. Pascoe’s, Nice Is Not Enough: Inequality and the Limits of Kindness at American High , Forrest Stuart’s The Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy , and Frederick Thrasher’s 1927 text The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago —to explore how young people constitute their own socio-legal orders. This exploration suggests a new front in research on legal pluralism while identifying mechanisms through which youth-centered socio-legal orders influence adult-centered orders via mobilization, cooperation, imitation, and imbrication.