Johnson v. Johnson’s Empirical Analysis
2000
Citation profile
1 district · 12 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 18 later decisions — most recently April 2021
1 district · 12 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 Miller v. Miller · Marriage of Fenn v. Fenn · Maragos v. A.S. · Fuller v. Fuller · Matter of Adoption of KAS
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 18 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“This is a case of a grandmother and her grandchild who have never lived in North Dakota. When the child's parents could not or would not care for her, her grandmother took her in. The grandmother's husband, although not the child's grandfather, welcomed the child and treated her well. The grandmother, but not her husband, was given temporary legal custody of the child. There was talk of adoption and some steps were taken, but the grandmother's husband did not adopt the child, nor did the grandmother adopt the child. The parental rights of the child's natural mother and natural father were never terminated. When the marriage of the grandmother and her husband was coming to an end, the grandmother, instead of seeking support from the child's parents, sought a declaration that her husband had "equitably adopted" the child and was therefore obligated to pay child support.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissente.g. Johnson v. Johnson“The need for the doctrine arises when the adoptive parent dies intestate; the doctrine is invoked in order to allow the supposed-to-have-been adopted child to take an intestate share. It is not applicable where the decedent dies testate.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissente.g. Johnson v. Johnson“But the problem for the majority is that if `equitable adoption' is adoption, it has not occurred. If it is not adoption, then the majority cannot impose a child support obligation on the grandmother's former husband.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissente.g. Johnson v. Johnson
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.