120
Opinion of the Court
asks us to treat her parental termination appeal as we have treated petty offense appeals; she urges us to adhere to the reasoning in Mayer v. Chicago, 404 U. S. 189 (1971), see supra, at 111-112, and rule that Mississippi may not withhold the transcript M. L. B. needs to gain review of the order ending her parental status. Guided by Lassiter and Santosky, and other decisions acknowledging the primacy of the parent-child relationship, e. g., Stanley v. Illinois, 405 U. S., at 651; Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U. S., at 399, we agree that the Mayer decision points to the disposition proper in this case.
We observe first that the Court's decisions concerning access to judicial processes, commencing with Griffin and running through Mayer, reflect both equal protection and due process concerns. See Ross v. Moffitt, 417 U. S., at 608-609. As we said in Bearden v. Georgia, 461 U. S. 660, 665 (1983), in the Court's Griffin-line cases, "[d]ue process and equal protection principles converge." The equal protection concern relates to the legitimacy of fencing out would-be appellants based solely on their inability to pay core costs. See Griffin, 351 U. S., at 23 (Frankfurter, J., concurring in judgment) (cited supra, at 110-111). The due process concern homes in on the essential fairness of the state-ordered proceedings anterior to adverse state action. See Ross, 417 U. S., at 609. A "precise rationale" has not been composed, id., at 608, because cases of this order "cannot be resolved by resort to easy slogans or pigeonhole analysis," Bearden, 461 U. S., at 666. Nevertheless, "[m]ost decisions in this area," we have recognized, "res[t] on an equal protection framework," id., at 665, as M. L. B.'s plea heavily does, for, as we earlier observed, see supra, at 110, due process does not independently require that the State provide a right to appeal. We place this case within the framework established by our past decisions in this area. In line with those decisions, we inspect the character and intensity of the individual interest at stake, on the one hand, and the State's
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