A new Pennsylvania Superior Court ruling holds that grandparents can lack standing to seek custody — even after years of a parent-consented relationship — if the timing of a long-closed parental custody case doesn’t line up.
By Michael Phillips | Family & State
Michele McGuire had a relationship with her grandson that her son’s ex-partner had approved of for years. Court records describe visits and weekends going back to shortly after the child’s birth in 2015. Her husband, Sean McGuire, was there too — Child’s step-grandfather “since the day [Child] was born,” according to the family’s own account in their appellate brief. Then, following an argument in late 2024, the boy’s mother cut off contact entirely.
When Grandmother sued for partial custody, Pennsylvania’s Superior Court didn’t ask whether the relationship was real, or whether cutting it off abruptly served the child’s interests. It asked a narrower question: was there, at that exact moment, an open custody case between the child’s parents. There wasn’t — and under the panel’s August 12 ruling in McGuire v. Lucchino v. Yeager, that answered the entire case.
“The court didn’t ask whether the relationship was real. It asked whether the parents’ custody case was still open.”
What the statute says, and what “have commenced” now means
“The present tense doesn’t reach backward.”
Pennsylvania grandparents seeking partial custody under 23 Pa.C.S. § 5325(2) must clear three things: a relationship that began with a parent’s consent, a custody proceeding the parents “have commenced,” and parental disagreement over whether the grandparents should have access. The parties did not dispute the first. The appellate fight centered on the second.
The child’s parents had, in fact, litigated custody once — Mother filed in 2016, then withdrew it by agreement. They’d also had a Protection from Abuse order with custody terms, though the opinion itself is inconsistent about the dates: one part of the ruling puts the final order at 2019, running until 2022, while another part — quoting the trial court — puts it at 2017, expiring in 2019. Either way, by the time Grandmother filed in May 2025, no parental custody case was open. The trial court read “have commenced” in the present tense — a currently pending case, not a historical one — and dismissed her complaint before it ever reached the question of the child’s best interests. The Superior Court affirmed, leaning on its own 2022 decision in Raymond v. Raymond, which read a neighboring provision of the same statute the same way: a deceased adoptive father, the panel had reasoned there, could not presently have “any form of care and control” of a child, because the present tense doesn’t reach backward.
Grandmother’s appeal pointed to the statute’s drafting history, though on a related rather than identical point: the pre-2018 version of § 5325(2) required parents to have commenced and continued a proceeding to dissolve their marriage. The rewrite dropped “and continued” entirely. Her brief argued that omission signaled the legislature’s intent to loosen standing requirements generally — not tighten them, as the trial court’s reading would do. The panel didn’t find that persuasive enough to overcome what it called clear statutory text.
A “settled arrangement” that wasn’t
Having decided the statute was unambiguous on its own terms, the panel went further, adding an alternative justification: even setting the text aside, it didn’t believe the legislature intended for grandparents to “disrupt a settled custody arrangement” long after a parental custody dispute had ended — calling the alternative reading an unreasonable result the legislature couldn’t have intended.
“The grandparent showed up to court after that disruption, not as its cause.”
But the record the court was working from doesn’t describe a settled arrangement being disrupted by a grandparent. It describes a settled arrangement — years of consented contact — being disrupted first, by the parent, over what the complaint characterizes as a single argument. The grandparent showed up to court after that disruption, not as its cause. The panel’s backup reasoning treats the legal proceeding’s staleness as the thing worth protecting, while treating the factual relationship’s continuity as irrelevant to the threshold question — which is precisely what a standing inquiry is designed to screen out before anyone examines the child’s actual interests.
“The ruling extends that logic to grandparents who are, by the court’s own account, not strangers at all.”
That’s not a drafting error on the court’s part; it’s what the standing doctrine is built to do. Pennsylvania courts have long described grandparent standing rules as serving two goals at once — keeping the courthouse open to genuinely interested parties while keeping it closed to “strangers, however well-meaning.” The ruling in McGuire extends that logic to grandparents who are, by the court’s own account, not strangers at all.
The step-grandfather wasn’t in this fight to begin with
“Twelve years of marriage and a relationship dating to birth were legally beside the point — at least under the provision he invoked.”
Sean McGuire’s claim didn’t survive to the merits. Pennsylvania’s grandparent-standing provision at § 5325 has no category for a step-grandparent, and the family’s own appellate brief conceded the point rather than contest it — the panel held the claim had been abandoned. That’s not the only door in Pennsylvania custody law, though: a separate provision, § 5324(2), allows standing for anyone who stands “in loco parentis” to a child — a functional-parent test with no biological-relation requirement, which Pennsylvania courts have applied to non-relatives before. Nothing in the record suggests Step-Grandfather pursued that route here. Twelve years of marriage to the child’s grandmother, and a relationship with the child dating to birth, were legally beside the point before the panel reached a single fact about them — at least under the provision he did invoke.
What’s now precedential
“The relationship could remain open for years even after the court case closed. Under § 5325(2), that distinction now matters.”
McGuire v. Lucchino v. Yeager is a published opinion — 2026 PA Super 182 — which means it doesn’t just resolve one family’s case. It sets the rule for Pennsylvania grandparents relying on § 5325(2) whose adult children’s custody litigation has gone quiet, whether through settlement, withdrawal, or an expired protective order, and who later need that route to the courthouse to still be open. For families in that position, it’s closed now — not because a judge weighed the relationship and found it wanting, but because nobody checked whether the underlying parental case was still open before the relationship needed protecting.
Sources: This piece is drawn from the Superior Court’s published opinion in McGuire v. Lucchino v. Yeager, 2026 PA Super 182, No. 1276 WDA 2025, filed August 12, 2026, including the trial court record, statutory text, and appellate briefing summarized within it, and from the current text of 23 Pa.C.S. §§ 5324–5325. The opinion contains two internal inconsistencies not resolved by this reporting: the trial court’s dismissal order is dated both September 16 and September 19, 2025, in different passages, and the Protection from Abuse order’s final entry and expiration dates are given as 2019–2022 in one part of the opinion and 2017–2019 in another (the trial court’s own later reasoning — that the proceeding expired “almost six years” before its November 2025 opinion — is consistent with the 2019 date). Neither discrepancy affects the outcome or this piece’s analysis, since no parental custody proceeding was open under any of the dates given.
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