Hurst v. Hurst’s Empirical Analysis
1946
Citation profile
32 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 32 later decisions — most recently March 1997 · most notably Belford v. Belford (1947), Laughton v. Laughton (1953)
32 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 Fields v. Fields
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 32 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“"Other things being equal, ... the mother of infants of tender years is best fitted to bestow the motherly affection, care, companionship, and early training suited to their needs."”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“[T]he question may be ... narrowed to the one whether the welfare of the child will be promoted if he is placed with first one parent and then the other, his home life interrupted every half-year. It is thoroughly established that in such circumstances the primary concern of the court is the well-being of the child, and we have grave doubt that an infant three years old can develop normally and thrive if at the end of every six months he is removed from surroundings familiar to him and forced to become accustomed to new ones. The predicament of the child would probably be further complicated by the fact that both parents have remarried.”
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.