Boyd Collar Nolen & Tuggle partner Cynthia Wright was quoted in an article about the Georgia Supreme Court’s 5-2 reversal of a Gwinnett County judge’s order that established joint custody between a child’s father and maternal grandmother.
Wright, who is a former Fulton County Superior Court chief judge, told the legal newspaper that increasingly during her 20 years on the bench, she saw cases in which grandparents sought formal legal roles. She explained, “Often, one parent isn’t involved at all, and the child has only one legal parent. The cases often involved a grandmother trying to help out her daughter by taking on a primary parenting role, sometimes with the mother’s consent.”
Noting that trial judges sometimes face competing interests—those of the parents, and those of the child, Wright said, “Frankly, I think I would rather be reversed on a decision that I made that I thought was in the best interests of the child.” The full article is available to subscribers here.