Penney v. Penney’s Empirical Analysis
1929
Citation profile
14 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 14 later decisions — most recently April 1979
14 state decisions
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 Brock v. Brock · Delle v. Delle · McClain v. McClain · Mead v. Worel · In Re the Guardianship of Stanley
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 14 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““Under these conditions, the love and affection which have grown up between the child and those in whose care she has been for ten years, is not a controlling factor. Nor is the fact, if such should be the fact, that the strangers to the blood might be able to give her more pleasant and luxurious surroundings, better educational facilities and like advantages, a factor to be weighed against the father’s rights, if he be a fit and proper person to have the custody of his own child.””
3 later decisions quote this exact passage““The child is entitled to know and enjoy the father’s love and care, to be brought up under the circumstances and conditions to which she was born and to have the love and society of brother and sister. The fostering care of a stranger, no matter how wise and kind, cannot fill the place of these. There is every reason to believe, even though the child’s attitude might be hostile at first, that, in a few months or a year or two at most, she will fit as naturally into her father’s home as if she had known no other; and she will then have the home memories to carry through life and hand down to her children. In other words, she will be a Penney, as she was born, with the memories and traditions of a Penney, and not a Mohr, whose traditions may be wholly foreign to those of the Penney family.””
2 later decisions quote this exact passage““Paternal or maternal rights will not be held to have been abandoned except upon a plain showing to that effect, and that the acts are without justifiable excuse.””
1 later decision 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.