155 N.C. App. 587 - McDuffie v. Mitchell’s Empirical Analysis
2002
Citation profile
11 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 11 later decisions — most recently May 2025
11 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 Price v. Howard · James v. Pretlow · McIntyre v. McIntyre · 153 N.C. App. 527 - Affordable Care, Inc. v. North Carolina State Board of Dental Examiners · 135 N.C. App. 359 - Penland v. Harris
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 11 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[U]nless a natural parent's conduct has been inconsistent with his or her constitutionally protected status, application of the "best interest of the child" standard in a custody dispute with a nonparent offends the Due Process Clause of the United States Constitution. Furthermore, the protected right is irrelevant in a custody proceeding between two natural parents , whether biological or adoptive, or between two parties who are not natural parents . In such instances, the trial court must determine custody using the "best interest of the child" test.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“not[ing] that where one parent is deceased, the surviving parent has a natural and legal right to custody and control of the minor children.”
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.