Dawne Mitchell, Chief Attorney of Legal Aid’s Juvenile Rights Practice, is co-author of a new New York Law Journal op-ed on the need for representation of the youngest New Yorkers.

Mitchell and her co-authors: Karen J. Freedman, founder and president of Lawyers For Children; Liberty Aldrich, a retired family court judge and executive director of Children’s Law Center; and Gary Solomon, former director of Legal Support for the Juvenile Rights Practice at The Legal Aid Society, make the case that having an attorney is critical for young children.

“The AFC (Attorney For the Child) for a toddler or non-verbal child can play an important role in ensuring that the court receives all of the relevant evidence needed to make a child-centered determination,” they write. “Absent an attorney representing the child, jurists are only able to review the partisan, cherry-picked evidence and arguments presented by lawyers on behalf of their self-interested adult clients.”

The op-ed comes in response to ill-informed questioning of the role of attorneys for children that was previously published in the journal.

Read the full piece here.