Charles v. Stehlik

Decided January 19, 2000

Supreme Court of Pennsylvania · decided 2000-01-19

Key passage — most relied on by later courts

“in order to obtain shared physical custody with equal custodial time. Id. Finally, Appellant asserts that the trial court erred when it considered the previous informal custody arrangement between Appellant and R.L as dispositive evidence in determining whether R.L. met her burden of proof. Id. For the following reasons, Appellant is not entitled to relief. The parent has a prima facie right to custody,”

quoted by 1 later decision, including R.L. v. M.A.

Relies on Ellerbe v. Hooks · Rowles v. Rowles

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 2000-01-19

How this case has been cited

Cited by 91 later decisions — most recently May 2025 · most notably T.B. v. L.R.M. (2001), Watkins v. Nelson (2000)

89 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.

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*343FLAHERTY, Chief Justice,

¶1concurring.

¶2I concur in the affirmance of the award of custody to appellee, but write separately to express that I favor the approach to custody determinations set forth in my concurring opinion in Ellerbe v. Hooks, 490 Pa. 363, 371-74, 416 A.2d 512, 515-17 (1980), which was followed by a plurality of this court in Rowles v. Rowles, 542 Pa. 443, 668 A.2d 126 (1995). That approach discards the presumption that a parent has a prima facie right to custody against third parties and substitutes a standard requiring that custody be determined by a preponderance of the evidence, weighing parenthood as a strong factor for consideration. Id. at 447, 668 A.2d at 128.