Sorensen v. May’s Empirical Analysis
1997
Citation profile
8 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 8 later decisions — most recently September 2025
8 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 Martin v. State · Cranston v. Cranston · Gurney v. Gurney · Duffy v. State · Roberts v. Roberts
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 8 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Judicial discretion is a composite of many things, among which are conclusions drawn from objective criteria; it means a sound judgment exercised with regard to what is right under the circumstances and without doing so arbitrarily or capriciously. Byerly v. Madsen, 41 Wash.App. 495 , 704 P.2d 1236 (1985).”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“A party who is seeking to modify the child custody provisions of a divorce decree has the burden of showing that a substantial or material change in circumstances which affects the child's welfare occurred subsequent to the entry of the initial decree, that the change warrants modification of the decree, and that the modification will be in the child's best interests.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Cobb v. Cobb
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.