In 1914, social reformer Jack Robbins and a group of adolescent boys in Chicago founded the Boys' Brotherhood Republic, an unconventional institution that did not seek to rehabilitate or punish wayward youths. Instead, the boys governed themselves, democratically and with compassion for one another. For nearly thirty years, Robbins was their "supervisor," and the will he drafted in the late 1950s suggests that he continued to care about forgotten boys, even as the political and legal contexts that shaped children's lives changed dramatically. Nobody's Boy and His Pals is a lively investigation that challenges our ideas about the history of American childhood and the law. Scouring the archives for traces of the elusive Jack Robbins, Hendrik Hartog examines the legal histories of Progressive reform, childhood, criminality, repression, and free speech. The curiosity of Robbins's story is compounded by the legal challenges to his will, which wound up establishing the extent to which last wishes must conform to dominant social values. Filled with persistent mysteries and surprising connections, Nobody's Boy and His Pals illuminates themes of sexuality, civil liberties, childhood and adolescence, race and ethnicity, and wealth and poverty across the American Century.