Child custody is among the most fraught topics the law confronts. It is the area in which personal relationships and raw emotions must be reconciled with legal rules and court judgements. Such is the case of “Ann,” an eight-year-old girl at the center of a case now before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Ann has periodically spent time with her paternal grandmother, but due to family squabbles, Ann’s mother stopped bringing Ann to visit. The grandmother filed a lawsuit saying she was entitled to visitation rights, which a Wisconsin statute allows grandparents to ask for in circumstances where they have a preexisting relationship with the child such that the severing of that relationship would not be in the child’s best interest.
Complicating matters, the U.S. Supreme Court has held that these familial relationships have a constitutional dimension. In the 2000 case of Troxel v. Granville, the Court struct down a Washington State law that granted grandparents visitation rights when to do so would be in “the best interests of the child.” This standard was constitutionally infirm, the Court held, because parents have important rights that cannot by overcome by a bare showing that the child would be better off being raised by someone else.
As the late Justice Antonin Scalia pointed out, a great number of children should be taken from their homes if the question is whether someone else might do a better job raising them. Wisconsin’s statute is somewhat different than the Washington law, in that it requires a greater showing before invading the parent’s decision-making. The question for the Wisconsin Supreme Court is whether that’s different enough to shift the constitutional calculus.