The (Un)deserving Parent: Exploring Parental Argumentation and Sole‐Custody Decisions in Swedish Courts

ABSTRACT Across the Western world, joint legal and physical custody is increasingly becoming the default post‐separation arrangement. While family policy and law encourage such arrangements, they may not suit every situation. In child‐custody court disputes, courts must consider whether sole legal custody is the best alternative for the child in each case. Building on a unique dataset of 535 Swedish child‐custody court decisions, this study examines how parents justify child‐custody claims in court and which argumentative patterns are most likely to result in a court order on sole legal custody. Deservingness theory serves as an analytical framework for structuring parents' arguments. Latent Class Analysis identifies five distinct classes of court cases—referred to as ‘dispute contexts’—based on how parents invoke different arguments: ‘Victim‐Offender’, ‘Mutual High‐Conflict’, ‘Parenting Capacity Concerns’, ‘Lone Carer’, and ‘(Re)‐litigating Non‐Resident Parents’. Regression analyses suggest that applicants are most likely to be awarded sole custody in the ‘Victim‐Offender’ and ‘Lone Carer’ contexts, and less likely in the ‘Mutual High‐Conflict’ context.