About
A reference work about children in the justice system
JuveLaw records how each jurisdiction treats children who come into contact with the criminal law: the age at which responsibility attaches, which courts hear their cases, what may be done to them, and which judgments settled the governing principles. Every structured fact carries a source and the date a human last checked it.
What this is
Comparative juvenile-justice information exists, but it is scattered across treaty-body reports, NGO monitoring, national statutes and academic articles, each with its own scope, its own vintage and its own definition of the thing it is counting. Answering a question as basic as "at what age can a child be prosecuted in this country, and when was that last true?" usually means reading four documents that disagree.
This site is an attempt to hold that in one structured, dated, sourced place — and to be explicit about where the record is thin rather than papering over the gaps with a confident-looking table.
What it covers
Two layers. A worldwide layer records the minimum age of criminal responsibility, the upper age of juvenile-court jurisdiction and ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, one row per country. A depth layer carries full profiles for 10 jurisdictions across 6 regions — United States, United Kingdom, India, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Germany, France, Brazil and Japan — each with up to 10 landmark judgments, for 100 in total.
The depth layer is not a ranking of importance. It reflects where the primary materials are accessible and verifiable in a language we read. Jurisdictions outside it are under-represented here because of our capacity, not because less is happening in them.
How it is built
Sources are ranked: statutes and law reports first, then official government publications, then treaty-body documents, then peer-reviewed scholarship, then NGO monitoring and journalism. A lower tier never silently overrides a higher one. NGO and news sources are used to detect that something has changed, never as the final authority for what it changed to.
Each structured field carries an "as of" date, which is the date a person last checked that value against its source — not the date the law changed and not the date the page was rebuilt. An old date is a signal that we have not re-checked it. We would rather publish a visibly stale date than an invisibly stale figure.
Changes are appended, never overwritten. When a tracked value moves, the old value and the new one are both recorded with the date, and the change appears in the timeline. That is what makes the site a tracker rather than a snapshot that keeps quietly rewriting itself.
Who it is for
Law students and academics doing comparative work; NGOs and advocates who need a defensible figure with a citation behind it; journalists checking a claim before repeating it; and policy researchers who want the shape of a reform across jurisdictions rather than one country at a time.
It is not for people seeking help with an individual case. Nothing here is legal advice, and we will not comment on a particular child or a live proceeding.
How it is funded
It is self-funded and independent. There is no advertising, no sponsored content, no affiliate arrangement and no institutional or governmental funder. Nothing on this site is paid for by anyone with an interest in what it says.
Everything is free to read and the datasets are free to download and reuse with attribution. The newsletter is the only thing we ask for, and it is double opt-in: an address is stored as unconfirmed and nothing is sent until the confirmation is answered.
If that changes — if the site ever takes funding or carries advertising — it will be disclosed on this page before it happens, not after.
When it is wrong
Some of what is published here is already out of date; comparative legal data is wrong the moment a legislature sits. A report is checked against the source supplied and against the source already attached to the field, and a correction is never applied on assertion alone, including ours. If the record is wrong the value changes, the change is dated, and a material correction — one that alters what a reader would conclude — is marked on the page.
About the children in these cases
This site writes about legal principles, not about people. It holds no identifying information about any child, and the reason is architectural rather than editorial: there is no column in which such a thing could be stored. Where a court anonymised a child, the anonymised caption is the only form published here, including where journalism used a name.
Editorial standards
Sourcing, review, the separation of reference from opinion, and our use of AI.