Sweeney v. Joneson’s Empirical Analysis
1954
Citation profile
23 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 23 later decisions — most recently January 2002
23 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 Blow v. Lottman · Hughes v. Bowen · Tompkins v. Lutheran Welfare Society · In Re Magee · Ex parte Summers
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 23 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The law presumes that the best interests and welfare of a minor will be best served by awarding its custody to the parent and the burden is upon those who claim otherwise to overcome such presumption by clear and satisfactory proof of abandonment or forfeiture or a legal surrender or unfitness of the parent to have custody, (emphasis supplied).”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“By nature and under the common law and by virtue of statutory provisions ..., a parent has a preferred legal right to custody of his or her own children. But under the common law and modern statutes as well, ... the state through the courts has a right under proper circumstances to terminate the parental right and deprive the parent of custody. To find the proper delicate balance between this right of the parent and the right of the state is the problem confronting courts in such cases as this where the parent but not the other claimant has a legal right. ****** [T]here is in our opinion this helpful guide well recognized in the body of the law: the parents’ right to custody over their own children should never be disturbed except upon a clear showing against the parent of “gross misconduct or unfitness, or of other extraordinary circumstances affecting the welfare of the child.” ... The fitness of this mother is therefore a matter of first consideration and her disqualification as custodian is a prerequisite to an award of custody to any other person;.... ****** We cannot take the position that this finding of “the best interest of said children” carries an inference of the mother’s unfitness. It is a false view of the law and of the issues involved to treat the action from the start as an equal contest between two contenders for the child, and without the preliminary determination against the parent’s right to custody, to weigh the balance against the parent on a mere findi”
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.