Amy says her final goodbyes to Graciela. Maxine realizes that she made a mistake in pushing Ignacio away and tries to reach out to him but Ignacio rebuffs her because he doesn't want to be her yo-yo, jerked around on Maxine's whims. Bruce is still absent on Amy's last day in the courtroom. Holbrook tries to raise awareness about the bill before Congress that will effectively kill the juvenille justice system. Donna is amazed that Amy refuses to support the cause and brings several of the kids whose lives Amy has changed during her time on the bench in an effort to change her mind. Amy, frustrated by her limitations as a judge, runs into Marty Levine, who again tries to convince her to give the speech in Washington and run for Senate. Amy runs the idea by Lauren who at first refuses to give a straight answer but later supports her mom when Maxine attacks the decision. That same night, Maxine must rush to save a young girl from being pimped out by her prostitute mother. Amy receive

Maxine fights to keep a deaf boy in the care of his teenage brother after they are orphaned; Bruce disagrees with Amy's decision in an interracial adoption case; Vincent gets a job teaching writing; Donna seeks Amy's assistance in getting a conjugal visit with Oscar; Vincent learns something surprising about his father.

Amy must decide if a student raped his teacher or was seduced by her; Kyle is unhappy about his nonmedical duties at St. Michael's; Maxine tries to locate the mother of an abandoned newborn; after Jason menaces Amy while she's driving Lauren and Eric home, Bruce suggests getting a restraining order; fearing the worst about her health, Gillian gets the diagnosis she's dreamed of for years.

Amy and Michael agree to work out Lauren's custody with a mediator; Maxine and Kimberly clash over a child lost in the system; Jared returns from China to get an answer from Maxine; Lauren fears that their apartment is haunted and Amy begins to agree with her; appearing before Amy in court as the caseworker for a teenaged mother, Maxine gives an impassioned plea which provides Amy with food for thought about not only the girl, but Amy's relationships with Maxine and Lauren; Bruce runs into Amy and spurns her offer of friendship, but later relents most emphatically.

Amy hears the case of a young boy charged with obstruction of justice for not revealing the name of the man who took pornographic pictures of him; Maxine contends with a woman who allows her abusive husband to violate a restraining order; Peter and Charles negotiate a prenuptial agreement for their parents; Jason Lobdel eludes Amy's police protection as he continues to stalk her; everyone walks on eggshells as Gillian suffers through ugly hormonal mood swings; Jared gives Maxine the diner; Amy's plan to censure an attorney backfires.

Amy's ruling in the case of a teenager who called in a bomb scare to avoid a test is complicated by the arrival of an I.N.S. agent who's ready to deport the boy to Afghanistan, and almost certain death, if he's found guilty; Eric saves Lauren from being kidnapped by Jason; Gillian's raging hormones leave Peter exhausted as she goes into overdrive about the plans for Maxine's wedding; Kimberly blackmails Sean into getting her job back in exchange for helping Maxine find an endangered teenager who's aged out of the system; Kyle defies hospital protocol to give a dying woman her last wish; Eric ends Jason's stalking with tragic finality.

Amy and Michael face off in court, and the resolution of their custody battle reveals yet another unsavory aspect of Michael's character; Kyle counsels a mother who struggles over a DNR order for her critically ill son; after Amy and Sean each confront her about Eric, Maxine visits him in jail to hear his story of the night Jason died.

A stressed out public defender goes ballistic in Amy's courtroom; Maxine tries to figure out why a woman who lost her son wants to give up her foster child; Kyle tells Lily how he feels, but it doesn't go as he hoped; Amy is confused about whether or not Stu actually proposed marriage; Gillian goes into labor with unexpected and seemingly tragic results.

Amy seeks to have Lauren qualified as a ""gifted"" student; Maxine agrees to take a anger management class after going too far in insulting a coworker and accosting the boy who vandalized the Gray home; Amy dates a detective who's ""out of her league""; Vincent agrees to be Donna's birthing partner; Amy presides at the sentencing hearing for a teenager who intentionally maimed a rival player during a hockey game.

Felled by the flu, Amy collapses in court, but not before presiding over a custody hearing for a cow; long-buried feelings erupt between Gillian and Peter when Evie offers to return Ned; Amy's caseload has more of an effect on her temporary replacement than he expected; after Sean grounds her to desk duty for taking wannabee gangbangers on an unauthorized field trip to the local I.C.U. which draws outcries from their parents, Maxine decides not to ask him for a few days off to accompany Jared on a business trip to China; Carole accepts a job offer in San Francisco and asks Vincent to come with her; Sean supports Maxine when Jared's plane is reported missing; the Gray family rejoices when both Ned and Jared are returned to them safely.

Maxine and Jared move up their wedding date, to the consternation of their children; Peter's plans for a classy bachelor party go awry, but the men manage to have a good time at a less highbrow establishment as they convince a greatly under-the-influence Bruce to call Zola and ask her for a date; Maxine's hen party is much more sedate, but Maxine manages to work out an escape plan nonetheless; Amy presides over a hearing to determine if four teenage boys accused of drugging and raping a teenage girl should be tried as adults; after Charles announces that he's quit his job, Jared is forced to return to China and reschedule the wedding, and Amy lets Charles know that it's not in his best interest to interfere with Maxine's happiness; Maxine's efforts to keep Eric's case in juvenile court are successful.

Maxine and Sean battle a sleazy attorney with a penchant for blackmail when they attempt to remove a child from her negligent parents; Amy presides over the case of a deadbeat dad who is willing to go to extreme measures to avoid paying child support when he learns that his son's paternity may be at issue; Maxine is ""filled with existential dread"" at the prospect of the wedding ceremony Gillian is planning for her; Kyle experiences a sleepless night discovering why the parents of a handicapped man who appears to be healthy insist that he be hospitalized overnight.

Amy Madison Gray struggles to adjust to the new circumstances in her life as she separates from her husband and becomes a single mother to her young daughter, Lauren; moves from Manhattan to Hartford, CT to live with her opinionated mother Maxine, a retired social worker; and starts a new career as a superior court judge in family court. The first case on her docket, the placement of a child abandoned by a drug addicted mother, introduces her to the shortcomings and political realities of the juvenile justice system.

Amy takes it personally when Stuart appeals her decision to overturn the jury's verdict; Maxine arrives at a creative solution in placing an extremely gifted teenager who chronically runs away from his foster placements; Donna becomes Vincent's new roommate; Amy must decide whether to remove a child from the care of a mother suspected of suffering from Munchausen by Proxy syndrome; after her verdict is upheld, Stuart asks Amy out on a date, and she royally disses him as she turns him down flat.

As Peter and Gillian prepare for Ned's christening, Evie returns to claim her son; Amy and Tom decide to make their relationship public; Carole has trouble dealing with Vincent's relationship with Donna; Maxine moves forward with her plans for Sanctuary House; Amy looks for signs of remorse from a teenage boy accused of killing his sister.

Peter and Gillian lose custody of Ned to Evie; Peter tries to drown his grief in alcohol and is arrested for drunk driving; Gillian fixates on Peter's drinking to avoid dealing with her loss; Amy must rule on the future of an unborn baby after learning that the mother is under investigation for the disappearance of her first child; Maxine and Sadie investigate the strange case of a woman who thinks she's a holly bush; Vincent and Carol attend her parents' 30th wedding anniversary party; Bruce loses his cool when he mediates a dispute over a teenager's plastic surgery.

Maxine reunites a couple with their kidnapped baby; Vincent is upset when Carole usurps his prerogative to tell his family about their move in his own way and time by blurting out the news over family dinner, while Amy is downright angry at her brother's decision; when she learns that he's been granted an appeal, Donna can't face serving Oscar with divorce papers herself; Amy watches helplessly as a mother whose custody petition she denied takes drastic measures to protest Amy's decision.

Amy must decide if a little girl in the middle of a bitter custody dispute is being molested by her father; doing research for a paper, Donna shadows Maxine during a day in which she deals with the neglected children of a severely depressed mother who refuses treatment; Kyle receives an unwelcome visit from his mother and sister; after employing a private investigator to follow Amy for over a year, Michael sues for full custody of Lauren; the decorator that Amy hires to redo the kitchen disparages Maxine's taste.

Stuart Collins returns from Sri Lanka reincarnated as a criminal defense attorney eager to take on Eric's case and renew his romance with Amy; Peter and Gillian hear unsettling news about the potential health of their unborn child; Maxine and Sean work together to create the best possible placement for a young Sudanese refugee; a father petitions Amy for legal custody of his 14 year old daughter after her mother allows her to drop out of school and pursue a full-time career as a pop star with an over-sexualized and age-inappropriate image.

Amy, Bruce, Lauren, Sean and Maxine rally around Eric as he goes on trial before an eccentric but wise judge; Maxine takes issue with Eric on a question of ethics about his testimony which colors her reaction to his verdict; after Zola breaks up with her boyfriend, she unsuccessfully resists Bruce's efforts to woo her; Kyle is faced with a medical and ethical dilemma when his patient's routine problem takes an inexplicable and tragic turn; Eric tells Maxine about a new person in his life; Heather and Kyle grow closer.

On ""Take Your Daughter to Work Day"", Lauren learns how lucky she is when she spends the afternoon with Maxine, and Rebecca becomes seriously injured after she falls during a seizure; Kyle continues to drink; Stu reassures Amy that she's a permanent part of his life after she fails to make a fabulous first impression during lunch with his opinionated mother; Bruce struggles to get a boy discharged from probation; after begging Lily to rehire Heather, Kyle is shocked when she refuses to return; Heather and Zola let the men in their lives know that they've got romance on their minds.

Maxine teeters on the brink of collapse as she refuses to move out of Colton Gerard's hotel room, rages against Sean for his failure to run the department properly, and is suspended after being arrested for slapping a foster child who has abused and neglected her elderly and ailing foster mother; Vincent gets an eye-opening look at his life through the eyes of a teenager in foster care who was abused by his mother; Peter's praise of Gillian's mothering skills draws them closer together when they meet with their son's teacher, and they are shocked to discover that Ned is biting other children because his genius-level I.Q. leaves him bored with school; Donna is angry when an over-controlling Amy steamrollers right over her and the State's Attorney in a misguided attempt to help Donna win her first case as an attorney and ensure that her mentally ill teenaged client receives the help he desperately needs from the system; distressed about her mother's arrest and refusal to return home, Amy

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Amy hears the case of an extremely abused, mentally ill teenager who has stabbed a teacher; Vincent's agent finds him a publisher who will sign him only if he completes another short story in the next four days; Maxine tries to help an overstressed young mother who is afraid that she will hurt her baby; Lauren strains Amy's patience as she waxes enthusiastically over Michael's girlfriend; Maxine faces a house full of her children for a week as Vincent moves back home to devote all his energies to writing, and Gillian takes a much-needed break from the strain that infertility has placed on her marriage; Vincent's short story inspires Gillian to return home to Peter and reconsider adoption.

Michael's insistence upon joint custody of Lauren after Amy requests an increase in child support payments dooms the divorce mediation process, and they each retain high-powered and aggressive attorneys; Maxine wants nothing to do with any celebration of her 60th birthday; Amy must decide whether a college senior should be charged as an adult for a fatal hit and run accident that occured when he was fifteen; Michael's attempt to win Vincent over to his side in the custody battle ends badly; Amy hears a father's petition which contests the divorce agreement requiring him to pay for his daughter's college education; Maxine deals with combative divorced parents who can't seem to manage a peaceful exchange of their three small children.