ASSOCIATE DEAN MAE QUINN SERVES AS KEYNOTE SPEAKER AT SYRACUSE LAW SCHOOL YOUTH JUSTICE EVENT
December 2022 — Associate Dean for Experiential Education Mae C. Quinn was the invited luncheon keynote speaker this semester at Syracuse Law School’s Raise the Age Summit, an event focused on policy changes to raise the maximum age for juvenile court matters to 18 to reduce the number of youth charged as adults in New York.
Until recently, New York was an outlier state with a juvenile court jurisdiction age of lower than 18. Reforms there to “raise the age” of juvenile court jurisdiction were in part modeled on similar reform efforts in Missouri, where Quinn and her law students helped to bring about various juvenile court system reforms. Missouri previously used age 17 as the juvenile court cut-off.
Quinn delivered remarks based upon that advocacy work, a recent article she co-authored with law students calling for the decriminalization of status offenses, and her forthcoming work in the Dickinson Law Review that addresses both racial bias and “childism” in legal proceedings and the rules of evidence.
Going forward, Quinn hopes to contribute to related efforts in Pennsylvania along with law colleagues, community partners, and law student advocates. While Pennsylvania juvenile courts have a jurisidictional cut-off of age 18, the Commonwealth has expansive prosecutorial “direct file” practices that allow even young teens to face adult court prosecution automatically.
Professor Mae C. Quinn brings over 25 years of experience as a practicing attorney, civil rights advocate, and leader in the legal academy to her role as associate dean of experiential education. She has successfully taught across the entire law school curriculum, including legal writing, doctrinal, seminar, field placement/practicum, trial advocacy, and clinical legal education courses. She and her law students have also recently filed amicus briefs with the United States Supreme Court and state high courts in several important criminal and youth justice matters. Her scholarship, cited widely by courts, advocates and academics alike, has been published in leading journals including the Boston College Law Review, BYU Law Review, Iowa Law Review, SMU Law Review, Wake Forest Law Review, Washington and Lee Law Review, Harvard Journal of Gender and Law, and New York University Review of Law and Social Change.