Nevada family-law case summaries

This case is about when grandparents in Nevada can get a court order requiring their grandchildren's parents to let them visit. Nevada law (NRS 125C.050) lets grandparents and certain other people ask a court for visitation, but only if "a parent of the child has denied or unreasonably restricted visits with the child." The grandchildren's parents, Ashley and John Franklin, divorced and were given joint legal and joint physical custody of the two children. During the divorce proceedings, the children had briefly lived with the grandparents under a six-month temporary guardianship. After the children went back to their parents, Ashley and John signed a partial parenting agreement saying that no one else, including the maternal grandparents, would have court-ordered custody or visitation. The grandparents then asked the court for visitation anyway. At the evidentiary hearing, the father (John) testified that, after a roughly five-month period when he had cut off contact based on a mistaken belief about Phillip's role in his fiance's arrest, he allowed the grandparents to see the children regularly during his custodial time - including afternoon visits, school pickups, an overnight on Christmas Eve 2021, a spring-break trip, and several overnight stays. Phillip kept a log showing 196 hours with the children in 2021. The grandmother (Carolyn), by contrast, said Ashley would not arrange visits during her custodial time. The trial judge found Ashley not credible and relied on John's and the grandparents' testimony. The trial judge ruled that, even though Ashley denied contact during her time, the overall amount of contact the grandparents had with the children - through John's parenting time - was enough that the grandparents were not being "denied or unreasonably restricted" from visiting. The petition was denied. The grandparents appealed. They argued the trial court essentially "rubber stamped" Ashley's refusal by ignoring the fact that she gave them no time at all. The Nevada Supreme Court affirmed. The key legal question was how to read the words "a parent" in NRS 125C.050(3). Does it mean the petition can go forward if just one parent denies visits? Or does the court look at the overall picture across both parents in a joint custody situation? The Supreme Court held that, where parents share joint custody and both participate in the case, courts should look at the petitioners' overall access to the children. If one parent is providing reasonable contact, the petition fails - the court does not need to scrutinize what the other parent is doing. The court reasoned this approach better balances two interests: the child's interest in having a relationship with grandparents (which is met if the grandparents are getting regular contact through one parent) and the parents' constitutional right to direct the upbringing of their children, recognized in Troxel v. Granville. Reading the statute the other way, the court said, would let petitions proceed even when the child is already getting plenty of grandparent contact, which would intrude on parental rights without serving the child. Applying that rule, the Supreme Court held the trial court did not abuse its discretion. The grandparents' factual reports of their visits supported the finding that contact was not unreasonably restricted. The grandparents' worry that their access could disappear in the future - what the court called the "volatility" of family relationships - was not, by itself, an unreasonable restriction. The court also declined to consider arguments the grandparents had not properly preserved below (that Ashley was unfit and that the court should adopt a "functional-parent" theory) and treated as moot their challenge to the order ending their temporary guardianship, since the six-month guardianship had already expired by its own terms.