Doe v. Doe’s Empirical Analysis
1981
Citation profile
50 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 50 later decisions — most recently December 2013 · most notably Cappetta v. Cappetta (1985), America Online, Inc. v. Anonymous Publicly Traded Co. (2001)
50 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 Bezio v. Patenaude · Malpass v. Morgan · Ryan v. Commonwealth · Walker v. Brooks · Ward v. Faw
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 50 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[o]nce an order of adoption becomes final, the natural parent is divested of all legal rights and obligations with respect to the child____The child, to all intents and purposes, becomes the child of the person adopting him or her to the same extent as if the child had been born to the adopting parent in lawful wedlock.”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage“While in both adoption and custody cases the primary consideration is the welfare and best interest of the child, it does not necessarily follow that the natural bond between parent and child should be ignored or lightly severed. On the contrary, this bond should be accorded great weight. We should apply neither the fitness test nor the best interest test to the exclusion of the other. We must determine whether the consequences of harm to the child of allowing the parent-child relationship to continue are more severe than the consequences of its termination.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Copeland v. Todd“[t]he most drastic and far-reaching action that can be taken by a court of equity is to enter a final order of adoption. Such an order severing the ties between a parent and a child is as final, and often as devastating, as though the child had been delivered at birth to a stranger instead of into the arms of its natural mother or father.”
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.