Roberts v. Ward’s Empirical Analysis
1985
Citation profile
42 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 42 later decisions — most recently May 2015 · most notably In Re Custody of Smith (2000), In re Whitaker (1988)
42 state decisions — followed in 12 states
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
Relationships
Relies on Santosky v. Kramer · ITT Continental Baking Co. v. William Inglis & Sons Baking Co. · Caban v. Mohammed · Mimkon v. Ford · State v. ROBERT H. ____
Most-quoted passages
The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 42 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“... the better view is that the superior court, as an instrumentality of the State, may use its parens patriae power to decide whether the welfare of the child warrants court-ordered visitation with grandparents to whom close personal attachments have been made. . . . . In determining whether or not to grant grandparental visitation, the court must consider the best interests of the child. In doing so, it recognizes that it is primarily "the right of the child to ... know her grandparents" which is being protected and not the interests of the grandparents. Moreover, in balancing the child's rights to know and associate with her grandparents against the parent's right to custodial autonomy, we note that we are dealing here only with visitation rights. "[G]ranting visitation is a far lesser intrusion, or assertion of control, than is an award of custody" and thus not nearly as invasive of parents' rights. Our holding today is in accord with the position taken by a number of other jurisdictions, which have found non-statutory bases for granting grandparents visitation rights.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage“by encouraging parents to raise their children in the best way they can by making them secure in the knowledge that neither the state nor outside individuals may ordinarily intervene.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage
How this case has been treated — in progress
Whether each later court followed, distinguished, criticized, or overruled this decision. The treatment classification (task #35) runs highest-cited cases first and lights up here as it reaches this one.