Judging Childhood: Law, Morality, and Discipline in Lebanon’s Juvenile Courts

Drawing on over a year of empirical research in Lebanon’s juvenile courts, including interviews with judges and court personnel, courtroom observation, and analysis of court documents, this paper examines how juvenile judges exercise discretion in cases of child protection and juvenile delinquency.

The paper highlights the distinct role of juvenile judges in Lebanon, where the legal framework grants broad discretionary authority. This discretion enables judges to assume a hybrid role extending beyond legal adjudication to encompass mentorship, discipline, and moral guidance. Judicial reasoning frequently draws on non-legal discourses, including religious, psychological, and cultural frameworks. Judges may invoke God, notions of morality, or principles of child development psychology alongside, or in place of, formal legal reasoning.

The paper argues that this flexibility operates as a double-edged sword. While juvenile justice frameworks are intended to shield minors from rigid legal formalism, broad judicial discretion and informality can also work against them. Under the pretext of acting in the child’s best interests, judges may sidestep procedural safeguards, restrict fair trial rights, and legitimize moralized forms of intervention. Rather than mitigating the law’s punitive reach, childhood itself can become a justification for deeper judicial intervention, regulation, and surveillance. Drawing on ethnographic evidence, the paper situates these findings within scholarship on judicial decision-making and critical children’s rights studies, questioning whether Lebanon’s juvenile justice system, despite its protective mandate, truly serves children’s best interests in practice.

The Intersection is a discussion group bringing together early career legal scholars to explore topics on—and voices in—equality and law.
We invite speakers across all affiliations and genders, with sessions focusing on either or both:

• Research addressing equality in law and society, including work on gender, race, feminism, and other dimensions of structural inequality, or
• Papers by women, gender minorities, and scholars from minoritized backgrounds working in legal academia on topics within their academic expertise

The discussion group provides a space for emerging voices to share work in progress, challenge traditional legal paradigms, and build connections across institutional and disciplinary boundaries. We welcome diverse methodological approaches—from doctrinal analysis to socio-legal research, legal theory to comparative law—united by a commitment to critical engagement with equality across legal contexts.

Sessions are designed as informal, collaborative discussions that prioritize dialogue and intellectual exchange among early career researchers. All are welcome to attend.

The convenor of the discussion group is Dr Marthe Goudsmit Samaritter

Interested in presenting a paper? Contact m.goudsmit@csl.mpg.de

Lama Karamé is a DPhil (PhD) candidate at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Faculty of Law, University of Oxford. Her research examines the socio-legal construction of childhood through an ethnographic study of juvenile courts in Lebanon, with particular attention to the limits of juvenile law and children’s rights, and to the intersections of childhood with class and gender.

She is a lawyer and socio-legal researcher working at the intersection of law and public policy, and has published on topics including legal mobilization and reform, socio-economic justice, juvenile justice, judicial decision-making and sentencing, and family law and religious courts in Lebanon. In addition to her research, Lama teaches Law and Justice Around the World at George Mason University and consults for international organizations, including UNDP and UNICEF. She holds an LL.B. in Public Law from Saint Joseph University of Beirut, a BA in Sociology from the Lebanese University, and an LLM in Law, Culture, and Society from SOAS, University of London (Distinction).