David Tanenhaus

What's the most important thing you are working on right now?
 
Máximo Langer, a professor of law and Director of the UCLA Transnational Program on Criminal Justice, and I are writing a book titled, “What are Children Due? American Juvenile Justice, Due Process, and the Problem of Adversarial Power.” We’re using the history of juvenile courts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to tell a big story about the transformation of American legal culture, constitutional law, and youth policy. Together or separately, we have presented parts of the manuscript at workshops or conferences on four continents. I’m currently working on a section about race and juvenile justice in the early twentieth century that includes our analysis of the Scottsboro Boys from the 1930s.  

Which of your recent books or articles should I read?

I recommend my short article, “The Fierce Urgency of Now and Then,” published in Law & Social Inquiry. It’s part of a forum about the adolescent development inspired jurisprudence that contributed to the abolition of the juvenile death penalty in 2005, and the more recent prohibition of mandatory life without the possibility of parole sentences for juveniles. 
 
When you are working on an article or a book, what's your favorite part of the process? What do you do during the process that others might find odd?

My favorite part of the writing process is collaborating with a brilliant scholar like Langer and working together to create our written voice for the project. Ideally, a reader should not be able to tell whether he or I wrote a specific sentence, paragraph, or chapter.  

The oddest part of my research method involves how I immerse myself in historical sources. I type verbatim transcripts of key sources. For my book The Constitutional Rights of Children, I created, for example, a transcript of the oral argument before the Supreme Court in In re Gault and typed up hundreds of pages of witness testimony from the 1950s about a bootcamp in Arizona. This transcription process helps me to internalize the logic and texture of sources. It feels like the past becomes ingrained in me, at least while I am working on a project. This is important because it takes years to write a book; it has to become a part of you.