87 Md. App. 389 - Shunk v. Walker’s Empirical Analysis
1991
Citation profile
21 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 21 later decisions — most recently June 2020
21 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 Duke Power Co. v. Carolina Environmental Study Group, Inc. · Ross v. Hoffman · Davis v. Davis · Hall v. State · Taylor v. Taylor
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 21 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Several criteria must be considered in arriving at [the best interest of the child], including, inter alia, the fitness of the parents, character and reputation of the parties, desire of the natural parents and agreement between the parties, potentiality of maintaining natural family relations, preference of the child, material opportunities affecting the future life of the child, age, health and sex of the child, residences of the parents and opportunity for visitation, length of separation from the natural parents, and prior voluntary abandonment or surrender.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“To warrant a modification of custody, a party must establish that the modification is necessary to safeguard the welfare of the child____[ 10 ] When a chancellor finds that the moving party has satisfied this heavy burden and established a significant justification for a change in custody, those findings must be accorded great deference on appeal, and will only be disturbed if they are plainly arbitrary or clearly erroneous.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“The guiding principle of any child custody decision, whether it be an original award of custody or a modification thereof, is the protection of the welfare and best interests of the child”
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.