Teen Legal Rights

Hempelman, K. A. (2000). Teen legal rights: Revised edition. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-30965-x

Why read this book

When you have a question about the law, you don’t have to call a lawyer. Start at the library, and in the library look for this handbook.

Summary

Hempelman covers a wide range of teen legal issues, including those related to driving, school, home life, work, independent living, personal appearance, divorce, sexual life, marriage and children, health and safety, alcohol and drugs, crime, discrimination, gay and lesbian issues, property rights, contracts, and going to court. For each topic she arranges the information in question-and-answer format, which makes it easy to find the particular information each reader seeks. She writes her answers clearly and covers a wide range of issues for each topic. In the section on schools, for instance, she includes a short section on legal issues related to school libraries. She concludes each topic with a list for further reading and a list of organizations and Web sites for further research. Although Hempelman addresses a national audience, she often provides a chart to highlight differences among the states on the topic under discussion. She also includes a glossary and an index to make this reference work easier to use.

Critical evaluation

A good reference work includes lots of information and organizes it so it’s easy to find. Hempleman succeeds on both counts. Teen Legal Rights is extensive without being overwhelming, and the clear organization of topics, the question-and-answer format, and the index make it easy to find discreet bits of information quickly. Although every topic Hempelman discusses is potentially a semester-long course in law school, her answers are concise and direct. Many of her answers, begin “Yes …” or “No …” rather than “Depends …”, which is an appropriate strategy when approaching a teen audience.

Curiously, Hempleman’s neutral approach to her topics disappears when she explains affirmative action. Here she quotes Shelby Steele, a widely known partisan for one side of the affirmative action debate. She presents a table that correlates educational attainment and income and disaggregates it on the basis of gender and race, and then she asks, “Do you think affirmative action works?” The information in the table could be used to argue for a yes or no answer to the question, but the tone suggests that Hempleman wants the reader to say, “No!”

Unfortunately, the book is probably too out-of-date to merit purchasing at this point. Hempleman answers the question “Can two men legally marry?” with an unqualified “No,” even though that’s not the case any more in several states. One hopes that Greenwood Press will publish an updated version of this useful reference soon.

About the author

A Google search for “Kathleen A. Hempleman” produced only eight results, all of them Web sites offering to sell this book. The note about the author in the book itself says only that she is an attorney in Phoenix, Arizona.

Genre: Contemporary non-fiction

Curriculum ties

• Teen Legal Rights would be a useful resource in a high school pre-law course both as a reference and as a study guide.

• The book would also be a good supplement for the unit on the judiciary in a civics or government class. Students could use the glossary to define basic legal terms and then search the index to find examples in the text of where the term applies in legal practice.

Book-talking ideas

• Read the list of topics from the table of contents and then solicit questions about legal issues from the audience. Demonstrate how easily answers are found in the book and then read the answers. Poll students in the audience to get a sense of how easy the answer was to understand and how well it supplied the information that the questioner sought.

Reading level/interest age

The text is clearly aimed for older teens, but the chunking of information means that younger teens highly motivated to find an answer to an question could probably use it, too.

Challenge issues

This reference book does not include sex, violence, or profanity. The presentation of legal information is straightforward and neutral (for the most part), making it difficult to image challenges to its presence in either a school or public library.

Responses

• Remind the challenger of the policy (in the case of the San Francisco Public Library) to present “all points of view on current and historical issues. Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.”

Why I chose to read this book

I wanted to read more non-fiction, and I found this book when browsing the teen non-fiction section of one of the branches in the public library system.