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2 Ohio St. 3d 154

In re Hartman

Ohio Supreme Court

Decided January 5, 1983

Ohio Supreme Court · decided 1983-01-05

Key passage — most relied on by later courts

“finding, order, or judgment of a juvenile court that a child is delinquent, neglected, abused, or dependent, for prejudicial error committed by such lower court.”

quoted by 2 later decisions, including In re E.H., In Re D.H.

“This court cannot award to juvenile courts by judicial fiat that which was not -6- Warren CA2021-11-108 CA2021-11-109 endowed by statute.”

quoted by 1 later decision, including In re H.E.C.

Relies on In re Becker

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1983-01-05

How this case has been cited

Cited by 30 later decisions — most recently June 2025 · most notably State v. Gideon (Slip Opinion) (2020), In Re D.H. (2018)

28 state decisions

12019831990200020102020decided

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.

View the full empirical analysis of this case →

Celebrezze, C.J.,

¶1dissenting. Because I would affirm the court of appeals, I must respectfully dissent.

¶2In my view, the majority incorrectly reads into R.C. 2501.02 the right to appeal a finding of a juvenile court that a child is a juvenile traffic offender. As a result, I feel that the court of appeals below correctly dismissed the instant appeal for lack of jurisdiction.

¶3R.C. 2501.02(A) grants the courts of appeals jurisdiction only over an “order or judgment of a juvenile court that a child is delinquent, neglected, abused, or dependent.” Plainly absent is a grant of jurisdiction to the court of appeals over an order of a juvenile court that a child is a juvenile traffic offender.

¶4The majority seizes upon the word “including” as used in R.C. 2501.02(A) to justify its determination that such a right to appeal exists. While I have no quarrel with the majority’s extensive treatment of the definition of “including,” I am convinced that the word’s placement in the statute *158does not lead to the result reached by the majority. “Including” in R.C. 2501.02 clearly modifies “judgments or final orders of courts of record inferior to the court of appeals within the district.” It does not modify, as the majority reasons, “judgment of a juvenile court.” Consequently, it is a strained interpretation of R.C. 2501.02(A) that would hold that the list of appealable juvenile court orders in the above statute is non-exclusive.

¶5Moreover, as I stated in In re Becker (1974), 39 Ohio St. 2d 84 [68 O.O.2d 50], a case interpreting R.C. 2501.02(A), “… specifically, absent a finding that a child is delinquent, neglected, or dependent, no appeal is available.” Id. at 86.

¶6At the time of the decision in Becker, supra,R.C. 2501.02(A) only listed “delinquent, neglected, or dependent.” The statute has since been amended to include “abused” children cases. Thus, a majority of this court has previously expressed its opinion that the list of juvenile court judgments which are appealable under R.C. 2501.02(A) is exclusive.

¶7The majority states, “… [t]his court cannot award to juvenile courts by judicial fiat that which was not endowed by statute.” Ironically, the majority disregards its own admonition by awarding appellate jurisdiction to the courts of appeals over matters specifically excluded from the grant of jurisdiction by the General Assembly. Often we walk a fine line between judicial interpretation and judicial legislation. In the cause sub judice, the majority has wandered across that line into the realm of the General Assembly to achieve its result. I cannot countenance such an approach.

¶8Accordingly, I would affirm the decision of the court of appeals below.

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