When Superior Court Judge Stephen Frazzini decided last November to bar publication of a Law Tribune article about a child custody case, he wrote that the privacy rights of children in juvenile court were “a governmental interest of the highest order.”
But not everyone agrees. Surveys of the laws of all 50 states reveal that juvenile court openness is a constitutional gray area, with individual states experimenting with increasingly open court policies in cases involving custody, abuse and neglect matters. (The juvenile court equivalent of adult criminal case—known as delinquency proceedings—are almost invariably closed by statute or court policy, in Connecticut and elsewhere.)
