Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 2000

Troxel v. Granville

530 U.S. 57 | 120 S. Ct. 2054 | 147 L. Ed. 2d 49 | 2000 U.S. LEXIS 3767

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Takeaway

In short, Troxel holds that courts must give special weight to a fit parent's decisions about third-party visitation; a judge may not override those decisions simply because the judge believes more visitation would be better for the child.

Background

Tommie Granville and Brad Troxel, who never married, had two daughters. After the couple separated, Brad regularly brought the children to visit his parents, Jenifer and Gary Troxel. When Brad died by suicide in 1993, the grandparents initially continued to see the children. Granville later sought to limit their contact to one short visit per month and holidays, rather than end it altogether.

The Troxels petitioned under Washington Revised Code § 26.10.160(3), which allowed "any person" to seek visitation "at any time" and authorized visitation whenever it "may serve the best interest of the child." The trial court ordered one weekend of visitation each month, one week in the summer, and time on the grandparents' birthdays. It found that the Troxels were a loving family and that the children would benefit from time with them.

The Washington Court of Appeals reversed on statutory grounds, but the Washington Supreme Court held that the statute allowed the Troxels to petition and then declared the statute unconstitutional. It reasoned that the statute intruded on parents' fundamental right to rear their children because it required neither a showing of harm to the child nor meaningful limits on who could seek visitation or when. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the judgment, but the O'Connor plurality relied on the statute's unconstitutional application to Granville rather than endorsing the Washington court's broad facial ruling.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether the Fourteenth Amendment protects a fit parent's authority to decide with whom her children will associate and visit.

Holding

Yes. The Due Process Clause protects the fundamental right of parents to make decisions concerning the care, custody, and control of their children.

Reasoning

The Court treated parental authority over child rearing as one of the oldest fundamental liberty interests protected by substantive due process. Meyer, Pierce, Prince, Stanley, Yoder, Parham, Santosky, and Glucksberg all recognize, in different settings, that parents have constitutionally protected authority to direct their children's upbringing, education, care, and custody.

This protection rests in part on the traditional presumption that fit parents act in their children's best interests. Parents ordinarily possess the maturity, experience, responsibility, and natural bonds of affection needed to make difficult decisions for their children; absent evidence of unfitness or inadequate care, the State generally has no reason to second-guess those decisions.

Issue #2

Whether Washington's nonparental-visitation statute, as applied to Granville, violated her substantive due process right as a fit custodial parent.

Holding

Yes. The statute was unconstitutionally applied because the trial court gave no special weight to Granville's visitation decision and instead substituted its own view of the children's best interests.

Reasoning

Washington's statute was exceptionally broad: it allowed any person to petition at any time and allowed a judge to order visitation whenever the judge believed it might serve the child's best interests. It supplied no presumption that a fit parent's decision was valid and no instruction to give that decision any particular weight.

No one alleged or found that Granville was unfit. Yet the trial judge's comments indicated a presumption that grandparent visitation should occur unless it would adversely affect the children. That approach effectively placed the burden on Granville to prove that visitation was not in her daughters' interests, the opposite of the constitutional presumption favoring a fit parent's judgment.

Granville had not cut the grandparents out of the children's lives. She had proposed regular, though more limited, visitation. The trial court disregarded that proposal, imposed a more extensive schedule, and supported its decision largely with general observations that the grandparents were loving and that the children could benefit from time with them. Those findings reflected only a disagreement between the judge and Granville over what arrangement was better.

The Due Process Clause does not permit a State to override a fit parent's child-rearing decision merely because a judge thinks a different decision would be preferable. On these facts, the visitation order impermissibly displaced Granville's protected parental judgment.

Issue #3

Whether the Court held that Washington's statute was facially unconstitutional in every application.

Holding

No. The plurality affirmed the judgment on an as-applied basis and did not adopt a categorical holding that every application of the statute, or every similarly worded visitation statute, is unconstitutional.

Reasoning

Although the Washington Supreme Court had invalidated the statute broadly, the plurality focused on the actual order entered against Granville. The trial court had exercised the statute's unlimited discretion without giving meaningful deference to a fit parent's decision, making the constitutional violation concrete in this case.

The Court emphasized that visitation disputes arise in varied family settings and that state courts often develop their rules case by case. It therefore declined to define the precise outer boundary of parental due process rights in every third-party-visitation dispute.

Issue #4

Whether due process always requires a third party to prove that denial of visitation would harm or potentially harm the child before visitation may be ordered over a parent's objection.

Holding

The Court did not decide that question.

Reasoning

The Washington Supreme Court had required a threshold showing of harm, but the plurality found that rule unnecessary to resolve Granville's case. The statute's breadth, the lack of deference to Granville as a fit parent, and the trial court's substitution of its own judgment were sufficient to establish an unconstitutional application.

The Court thus left open whether a harm requirement is constitutionally necessary in all nonparental-visitation cases and cautioned against announcing a per se rule for all state visitation statutes.

Concurrences

Justice Souter

Reasoning

Justice Souter agreed that the judgment should be affirmed, but he would have affirmed the Washington Supreme Court's facial invalidation of the statute rather than examined the trial court's particular application. In his view, the state high court had authoritatively construed its law to permit any person, at any time, to obtain visitation under an unconstrained best-interests standard.

That construction swept too broadly because it allowed a judge to compel a child's association with any third party whenever the judge believed the judge could make a better decision than the parent. A parent's established right to direct a child's upbringing would be hollow if it did not include protection against that form of open-ended judicial control.

Souter would not decide whether a showing of harm is always required or elaborate the precise scope of substantive due process. The statute's facial breadth alone resolved the case, and further constitutional theorizing would unnecessarily enter the "treacherous field" of substantive due process.

Justice Thomas

Reasoning

Justice Thomas agreed that existing precedent recognizes a fundamental parental right to direct a child's upbringing, and he noted that neither party had asked the Court to reconsider whether substantive due process protects unenumerated rights. He therefore accepted that precedent for purposes of this case without addressing its originalist validity.

Thomas differed from the plurality because he would expressly apply strict scrutiny to an infringement of this fundamental right. Washington lacked even a legitimate governmental interest, much less a compelling one, in second-guessing a fit parent's decision about her children's visitation with third parties.

Dissents

Justice Stevens

Reasoning

Justice Stevens believed the Court should have confronted the Washington Supreme Court's facial ruling directly and remanded rather than conduct its own as-applied review. The state appellate courts had not decided whether the trial court properly applied the state statute, so the Supreme Court was poorly positioned to infer the governing state-law standard or reassess the record in the first instance.

He rejected facial invalidation because the statute had a plainly legitimate sweep. Its reference to "any person" could include a former custodial caregiver, an intimate family relation, or even a biological parent with a substantial relationship to the child; visitation for such persons can be constitutionally permissible in many circumstances.

Stevens also rejected a categorical constitutional harm requirement. Parents have powerful liberty interests and ordinarily deserve a presumption that they act in their children's interests, but those interests are not absolute. Children have interests of their own in maintaining established family-like bonds, and States may balance those interests against parental authority through a properly applied best-interests standard.

In Stevens's view, the Constitution leaves States room to protect a child from an arbitrary parental decision that does not actually serve the child's welfare. He would remand to permit the Washington courts to construe and apply their own statute with appropriate deference to parental judgment.

Justice Scalia

Reasoning

Justice Scalia believed that parents possess a natural right to direct their children's upbringing, but he did not believe federal judges have constitutional authority to enforce that unenumerated right against state legislation. The Declaration of Independence and the Ninth Amendment, in his view, do not authorize courts to identify and enforce unenumerated rights as substantive due process guarantees.

He would not overrule the Court's earlier parental-rights precedents because no party requested that result, but neither would he extend them to this new visitation context. Defining who qualifies as a parent, which third parties may have competing claims, and what degree of harm justifies intervention would create a federally prescribed system of family law.

Those policy choices, Scalia concluded, belong principally to state legislatures, which are locally accountable and can revise their rules more readily than federal courts. He would reverse the Washington Supreme Court's judgment.

Justice Kennedy

Reasoning

Justice Kennedy agreed that a custodial parent has a due process right to raise a child without undue state interference. But he concluded that the Washington Supreme Court's categorical rule—that a third party must always prove harm to the child before a court may use a best-interests standard—was too broad.

Family arrangements vary widely. In some cases, a third party may have acted as a caregiver for a substantial period and developed a deep, family-like relationship with the child. In those circumstances, a State may be able to use a best-interests standard while still giving adequate constitutional protection to the parent's interests; the parent-child relationship is not identical in every dispute involving a grandparent, another parent, or a de facto parent.

Kennedy also recognized that litigation itself can burden a parent's constitutional interests, particularly when a single parent faces costly visitation demands. Still, the proper constitutional safeguards should be developed cautiously through fact-specific state adjudication rather than through a sweeping federal rule.

He would have vacated the judgment and remanded so that the Washington Supreme Court could reconsider the case without its categorical harm requirement and could decide, in the first instance, whether the statute or the specific visitation order was unconstitutional under a more tailored approach.