Cognitive biases are tendencies to make certain decisions or behave in certain ways. Cognitive biases are predictable behavioral or decision patterns that all humans share. Often, these biases use mental shortcuts to make decision-making faster and easier. And these shortcuts are usually good....

The latest issue of The Pennsylvania Lawyer magazine features an article by attorney Ashish Joshi, who is a proponent of the so-called “parental alienation defense.”  The article includes extensive discussion on the purported merits of parental alienation theory in our family court system. The...

An Ohio toddler was killed by her mother,[1] despite child protection workers’ awareness of previous instances of abuse. Ohio courts must hold that agency and its workers responsible for their failures.  As outlined in CHILD USA’s amicus curiae brief, found...

I just saw the movie Sipe: Sex, Lies, and the Priesthood. It is about Richard Sipe, an expert on the Catholic clergy’s abuse of children. Sipe was a psychologist and a former priest, who used his expertise to help children and to try to hold the church accountable for its misconduct. This moving...

Before joining the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania’s Fels Institute of Government and starting CHILD USA five years ago, I was a constitutional law professor at Cardozo School of Law with a chair in public law.  Before that, I had the honor and pleasure of clerking for Judge Edward R....

“I had sex with boys almost every day I was a priest (161).” Those words described the actions of the priest, Father Francis Dubois, that the fictional lawyer, Renon Chattelrault, was asked to defend in this case from the early 1980s. At the same time, a “ten-year-old child victim was bringing a...

You might be reluctant to read this new book. It is very scholarly, written by Professor Elliott, an eloquent professor of medieval history. Its title—The Corrupter of Boys—might scare you away from reading a book whose name suggests something terrible. But its dedication, “to all those, living or...

Introduction Sarah Powers Barnhard is a former elite youth athlete who was repeatedly sexually assaulted by Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) coach Rick Butler. In 2018, Sarah and five others filed a class-action lawsuit against Butler for sexual abuse. In response to the sexual abuse allegations...

In 2002, the nation was rocked by the Boston Globe’s publication of its bombshell report exposing the intentional coverup of child sexual abuse in the Archdiocese of Boston.  Our country was forced to reckon with the Catholic Church’s contribution to the national child sex abuse crisis that...