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The Sayra and Neil Meyerhoff Center for Families, Children and the Courts (CFCC) is a national leader in the movement to reform the family justice system. We work to create, implement, improve and evaluate unified family courts nationwide.

Our work builds upon two core principles—therapeutic jurisprudence and the ecology of human development—and our programs incorporate and promote problem-solving activities.

We strive to produce best outcomes for families and children by encouraging lawyers and judges to apply the law and legal processes in ways that account for the complex circumstances that affect individuals’ and families’ lives. We develop educational programs for law students and practicing attorneys, and we implement our philosophy through a range of community-based activities that have a direct impact on children, families and communities.

CFCC’s founding focus was on promoting a unified family court system in Maryland and nationally. A unified family court is a court structure and operations model that can respond to the full range of legal issues that arise in family law cases—divorce, custody, child support, domestic violence, delinquency, abuse and neglect, among others—within one court, while simultaneously addressing non-legal issues that challenge families, such as education, housing, poverty, parenting, substance use and mental health.

Therapeutic jurisprudence (TJ) is a central tenet of the unified family court model. TJ operates to ensure that all interventions in family problems make matters better, not worse, for families and children. For example, working with judges and court personnel in Maryland, CFCC facilitated a mission statement for Maryland’s Family Divisions that aims “to provide a fair and efficient forum to resolve family legal matters in a problem-solving manner, with the goal of improving the lives of families and children who appear before the court.”

The ecology of human development is a theoretical paradigm from the social sciences that examines the child and family from a holistic or systems perspective, considering all of the different relationships and structures that affect a child’s life and development. It encourages a comprehensive approach to resolving family problems.