Court Opinion

ID: 9699006
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 20:06:36.560185+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:20:45.400539
License: Public Domain

*435Robert W. Hansen, J.
(concurring). The temptation is strong to join without comment the clear logic and sound reasoning of the majority opinion. However, I would go further than the majority in holding that a child born out of wedlock has no legal father until court proceedings establish the fact of identity and entitlement to such status. Also, I feel that the petitioner clearly has lost his right to review the children’s court order denying his claims by his failure to appeal.
1. Failure to identify.
When a child is born to a married woman, the presumption, rebuttable, is that the husband of the mother is the father of the child. So, at the moment of its birth, the child born in wedlock has, presumptively at least, a legal father.
When a child is born to an unmarried woman, it is known only that someone is its father. Who that someone is is not known, and no legal presumption exists to narrow the field of possibilities. So, at the moment of its birth, the child born out of wedlock does not have a father whose status and identity have been legally, even presumptively, determined.
The words, “putative father,” describing the someone who in fact sired a child born out of wedlock, has a solid ring. Too solid, if it implies that, at the moment of birth of an illegitimate child, there is in existence one who has legal status as such putative father. That legal identity is established in a courtroom, not a bedroom. It is not created by statements, affidavits or pleadings. It is created by the judgment of a court of competent jurisdiction in appropriate proceedings. Until it is so established, the illegitimate child has no legal father, and no one is. entitled to rights or bound by the responsibilities of putative parenthood. It follows that no one is entitled to notice of proceedings as to termination of parental rights or adoption of children born out of wed*436lock unless and until he has established in court that he is, in fact, the father of the illegitimate child. The status is created by the judgment of the court. It does not exist until it is so established.
The dissent here points out that one determined to be the father of a child born out of wedlock must pay lying-in expenses and is responsible for support payments. Why, it asks, “should he be denied correlative rights?” The answer is that both rights and responsibilities follow a court adjudication as to paternity. Neither exists until identity is established, and legal status determined. The dissenter’s conclusion that “such a father” should have “rights to custody which should not be destroyed or terminated without notice to him and a fair hearing and for proper reasons,” falls, not because of administrative difficulties involved, but because until a court acts to determine paternity of children born out of wedlock, no one has the legal status and identity to which rights and responsibilities alike relate. The required first step for the petitioner here was to establish in court that he was in fact and law the father of the child. Without such status, his claims to rights to notice, hearing or custody have no foundation upon which to be based. Denied by a trial court a determination that he was such father, his second and only available step was to appeal the court order denying his claim of such status and claims of right based thereon.
2. Failure to appeal.
In its Children’s Code, the Wisconsin legislature has provided that:
“Any person aggrieved by an adjudication of the county court under this chapter and directly affected thereby has the right to appeal to the circuit court in the same county within 40 days of the entry of the order . . . .” Sec. 48.47, Stats.
*437Here, on December 5, 1968, the petitioner petitioned the county court of La Crosse county for an order vacating its earlier order terminating the parental rights of the child’s mother and appointing Lutheran Social Services of Wisconsin as guardian of the child. Subsequently, a hearing on this petition was held, and, on November 11, 1969, the court entered judgment denying the petition. As a final judgment denying the rights and relief sought by petitioner, that judgment clearly was appeal-able. It was not appealed, and the time for appeal has long ago expired. So the petitioner not only slept with the mother of the child, he also slept on his right to appeal, and lost such right by such sleeping.
There is sound public policy involved in the statutory insistence that appeals from orders affecting the future life and well-being of children be made within a forty-day period. The majority opinion states well the tragic consequences of time-consuming delays in the proper, prompt and permanent placement of illegitimate children in stable home surroundings with adoptive parents. It is bad enough that the disposition of criminal prosecutions is delayed for months and years. It is sad enough that crowded court calendars delay trials of personal injury actions for even longer. At least the legislature has sought to avoid similar delays in the appeals of orders entered under the authority of the Children’s Code. There is no good reason why a petitioner who has elected not to appeal a county court order denying his claim of rights as a “putative father” should be permitted to evade the forty-day limit on children’s court appeals by much later seeking a writ that is a clear attempt to review and reverse the county court order which can no longer be appealed. So I would deny the writ. In fact, I would not have entertained it in the first place.