King v. Smith
1968 United States Supreme Court case

King v. Smith, 392 U.S. 309 (1968), was a unanimous decision in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) could not be withheld because of the presence of a "substitute father" who visited a family on weekends. The issue before the US Supreme Court involved how the states could determine how to implement a federal program. The court used the term "co-operative federalism." Shapiro v. Thompson, King v. Smith and Goldberg v. Kelly were a set of successful Supreme Court cases that dealt with Welfare, specifically referred to as a part of 'The Welfare Cases'.
Background
Mrs. Sylvester Smith was a Dallas County, Alabama resident who had four children, without a biological father providing support. The father of three of her children had died and the father of her fourth child was not in the picture.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6412414. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1968.
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This entry incorporates text from “King v. Smith” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.