By Suzi Morales
Sarah Katz has been an advocate, scholar, and teacher engaging with the child protection system, which she and other scholars and advocates say is more aptly called the family policing system, for more than two decades. Despite the advantages of excellent education and training, and her scholarly knowledge of the role of racialized trauma and injustice perpetrated by the system, she says her most important influences in understanding the system’s harms and how to prevent them have come from the families most impacted by it.
Katz was uncomfortable being interviewed for this piece, because she says centering herself misses the point. As Katz explains it, the polestar of her current work is to follow the lead of families most impacted by family policing, through critical connections and sustained community, forging partnerships and solidarity to further families’ vision for change. Katz emphasizes that more traditional modes of scholarship and advocacy are often extractive, centering and privileging the perspective of the scholar or advocate, rather than amplifying the actual voices and building power of families. “The most important experts not only in identifying the system’s harms, but in identifying and working toward the solutions, are families themselves,” Katz says. Through participatory scholarship (a field of legal study created by Katz’s colleague, Temple Law Professor Rachel López) in partnership with impacted advocates, she is not only publishing meaningful scholarship, such as a just published article with co-author Corey B. Best, titled True Narratives: Framing Pain, Punishment and the Lethality of Termination of Parental Rights, but has designed the advocacy model for the new Family Justice Clinic at Temple Law.
Since 2012, Katz has been a clinical professor of law at the Temple University Beasley School of Law, where she has taught and directed the Family Law Litigation Clinic. She has represented parents and caregivers enmeshed with the family policing system throughout her legal career.
Katz became passionate about family defense after a summer internship at the Legal Aid Society of New York -Juvenile Rights Division following her 1L year. That summer opened her eyes to the racialized systemic harms of family policing. In Manhattan Family Court, she was enraged by the magnitude of a system that so easily and routinely subjected Black and brown families to the trauma of family separation, and the lack of resources or robust advocacy to keep families together. In one case, a young mother’s baby was removed by the state at birth because of concerns about housing stability. After some investigation, Katz and another intern learned the young mother had hidden the pregnancy from her Catholic and Mexican immigrant family, and feared she might be unable to bring her new baby home to her intergenerational household. When the entire family rallied around the young mom, the baby’s Legal Aid attorney was able to prove the mother and baby had a strong family support system, thus preventing the baby from remaining in the often-dangerous foster system. Conversely, the attorney assigned to represent the mom had met his client for the first time approximately 30 seconds before the hearing, did not speak Spanish, and had conducted no independent investigation. Without advocacy by the Legal Aid attorney, the family would likely have remained unnecessarily separated, a devastating harm to both the young mother and newborn.
The incident underscored to Katz not only the importance of robust legal advocacy to keep families together, but also the harms the system perpetuates in the name of child protection. Returning to law school that Fall, she delved into the scholarship of Professor Dorothy Roberts, and others, which helped her understand the historic and systemic conditions that led to what she experienced in Manhattan Family Court that summer. These are the harms Katz seeks to address in an ambitious new project to promote racial justice in the family policing system.
Grant to address racial injustice
In July 2023, Katz was awarded a three-year senior fellowship by the Stoneleigh Foundation to explore an important question: in what ways have legal education and the legal profession reinforced and perpetuated the systemic racism inherent to family policing? Her suggested answer: if we are serious about repairing the harms which family policing has wrought on Black and brown families and communities, we must follow the lead of those most impacted – the families themselves.
Over the course of the past two years, Katz has formed critical connections and sustained community with impacted advocates both locally and nationally. She has produced participatory scholarship which has fueled a vision for participatory action and advocacy. The result: a newly founded law clinic at Temple Law called the Family Justice Clinic.
Black parent advocates Corey Best, founder and community curator of Mining for Gold; April Lee, co-founder and program director of Philly Voice for Change; and Joyce McMillan, founder and executive director of Just Making A Change for Families, along with other advocates have co-designed Katz’s work for the fellowship. With the support of the Participatory Law Fund, Lee and Katz co-authored an article titled Lies My Child Welfare System Has Told Me: The Critical Importance of Centering Families’ Voices in Family Policing Legal Advocacy, that was published in the October 2024 issue of Family Court Review. Best and Katz co-authored a new article titled True Narratives: Framing Pain, Punishment and the Lethality of Termination of Parental Rights that was just published in Families in Society.
In April 2024, Katz moderated a panel featuring Best, Lee and McMillan at the first-ever Temple Women’s Conference, the theme of which was “Reimagining Safety.” The panel followed a keynote by noted scholar Dorothy Roberts, whose work had deepened Katz’s passion for family justice work after that pivotal law school internship. During the event, the panelists discussed their observations as both activists and parents of the harms to Black and brown communities created by the family policing system, as well as strategies for justice. They encouraged white audience members to use their advantages to open doors for leaders of communities of color, and also to get out of the way, in order to accomplish systemic change. “I am a part of my community,” remarked Lee. “I am in love, and of love, for my community, and it’s going to take our community to change it.”
In February 2025, the panelists reunited as part of a full-day convening held at Temple Law, celebrating the official launch of Philly Voice for Change, which was co-founded by April Lee. Best called on attendees to commit to a vision of liberation through cross-racial solidarity and justice-doing: “We have to recognize that the path forward from this thing…is not going to come in between your 9-5.” He continued, “liberation as a principled discipline and a way out of dependence on institutions must come first…”. Katz commented “Showing up in solidarity to me means showing up with humility and intentionality and in relationship – but learning to be quiet, listen deeply, and get out of the way…Solidarity means speaking out when it helps leverage and build community power.” Indeed, Lee opened the day with a spoken word poem titled “Power” which concluded: “This is our time to overcome and rise out of the ashes; So raise your voice, build the village and pray that freedom will no longer pass us.”
From activist to advocate to scholar
Katz didn’t always want to be a lawyer. “I wanted to be an activist,” she recalls of her younger self. After graduating from Columbia University, she began working for the Children’s Defense Fund – New York on policy advocacy and as a community organizer, coordinating outreach and enrollment campaigns for subsidized health insurance in predominantly immigrant communities in partnership with community organizations. As she began meeting public interest attorneys working for social justice, she realized law school was the path she wanted to take.
After law school and a federal clerkship, Katz worked for eight years representing parents in child abuse and neglect cases at Philadelphia’s Community Legal Services. She was passionate about representing parents because it was a way to fight to keep families together and push back against the racialized harms caused by the system.
In 2005, Katz began teaching part-time as an adjunct professor at Temple Law, and later at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, teaching a child welfare law seminar titled “Parent, Child and the State.” Twenty years later, Katz has revamped the syllabus to center the voices of impacted families, and titled the course Policing Families.
Since 2012, Katz has been a full-time professor, directing Temple Law’s Family Law Litigation Clinic. After piloting the pedagogical and advocacy model throughout this past academic year, in Fall 2025, Katz will welcome students to the newly formed Family Justice Clinic.
Imagining and building a different future
Most of Katz’s scholarly work to date has focused on trauma-informed legal practice and the family policing system. Another recently published article engages both, re-evaluating earlier work on trauma-informed legal practice with new understanding based on ongoing proximity to the people most impacted by structural racism, racial capitalism, and oppression based on intersectional identities. As she looks forward to the next chapter, she credits the Stoneleigh Fellowship with creating an opportunity not only to shift focus, but to grow in immeasurable ways as a scholar, advocate and teacher. Katz says she was inspired by the groundswell of community organizing by parents and former foster youth to create systemic change, and the invitation it creates to adjust approaches to legal advocacy and legal education.
“The relationship with the legal profession is not always an easy one for families who have experienced the pain and punishment of family policing,” Katz says. “Meaningful partnership and solidarity between impacted families and the legal profession means more than just hearing their stories. This is not simply an exercise in storytelling. It’s actually an exercise in ceding advantages and leveraging the power of families to craft their own future.”
Katz thinks the legal profession needs to reckon with its own role in enabling the harms the system causes, and believes that starts with how we educate law students about this area of law. “This is a system that tears apart Black and Indigenous families far more often than any other families, and that’s devastating entire communities, entire generations,” she says. “It is not enough to teach future lawyers to identify the harms; we need to teach them the actual skills, both legal and non-legal, which it will take to both imagine and build a different future.”