Sitting in for a friend who's undergoing chemotherapy, Amy presides over her first jury trial and clashes with a former law school classmate who represents the parents of a murdered girl who are suing the parents of her teenaged killer; Maxine shops for a new car for the first time in her life; Vincent feels that Maxine doesn't take his writing seriously after she interrupts his work to ask him to babysit the six rambunctious first graders attending Lauren's sleepover party.

Amy must determine if a comatose boy who is believed to have healing powers is being abused by his grandmother; Maxine clashes with her supervisor over taking an underfed little girl away from her anorexic mother; Vincent begins a relationship with an older woman.

A death threat, coupled with Maxine's disapproval, puts a crimp in Amy's blossoming relationship with Tracy; Vincent begins to feel like he's Chris's pet project; Maxine rekindles an old friendship; Amy officiates at Donna's wedding to a convict; Maxine helps a second generation foster teenager keep her infant son out of the system.

Short calendar day drops 54 cases on Amy's docket, and the long day stretches into night when she's forced to make a life and death decision about the fate of an abused child; Maxine decides to return to work; Amy's confrontation with Lauren's obnoxious new teacher leaves her with yet another responsibility in an already jam-packed calendar.

A woman fights for custody of her son after the boy's father claims that her practice of the Wiccan religion makes her an unfit mother; Vincent gets an agent; in the week before Halloween, Lauren gets spooked by some older boys; Amy confronts narrow-minded attitudes at the P.T.A. meeting; in direct defiance of Susie's orders, Maxine pursues the search for a boy missing from a family with a history of child abuse.

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.

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 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.

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's discovers that the man the police have in custody may not be her stalker after all; Maxine refuses to give up on a client who may be the victim of police brutality; after Bruce denies having romantic feelings for Amy and they agree that confusion and alcohol led to their embrace, they decide to be friends who don't kiss; Kyle applies for a residency and is confronted by his sponsor for not working his program; a persistent attorney paves the way for Bruce to regain his court position; Amy must decide if a retarded teenager is competent to make her own reproductive choices.

After Amy accidently sets on fire the homework that Lauren has spent hours painstakingly hand-calligraphing, she agrees to make it up to her by spending the weekend role-playing at an 18th century inn and inviting Maxine to join them. The going is rougher than she anticipated when they are assigned the roles of kitchen servants. Over a late night fireside heart-to-heart chat, Maxine and Amy share their dislike of change and inability to reconcile conflicting emotions about their place in the world. Bruce pursues Zola after meeting, and being completely unimpressed by, her boyfriend. Kyle treats a 14 year old girl who delivered a baby in a high school bathroom, and cannot get through to the girl's mother, who is unwilling to accept her responsibilites as a parent. Gillian gets an unexpected job offer after spending a long day waiting to interview a new pediatrician. Amy must revoke a custody order after a father reverts to his former abusive ways.

Maxine's reunion with Sally Godwin, her college classmate and former co-worker in the social work trenches, comes under strain after the up-and-coming politician reveals that she's back in town to evaluate Maxine's performance, and they clash over the case of a child with a sexually transmitted disease; a father testifies on behalf of his teenage daughter who appears before Amy for conspiring in his attempted murder; Bruce utilizes Donna's assistance in a creative approach to mediating the divorce of an elderly couple fighting over custody of their pet parrot.

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Amy presides over the custody hearing of a boy whose mother died in the collapse of the World Trade Center; an old friend offers Kyle a job with a pharmaceutical company, and Maxine counteroffers with the job of heading the Center; Amy relandscapes her new home and accidently throws out Ethel, the antique heirloom rosebush Maxine's grandmother brought over from Ireland in 1889; after initially spurning her offer, Bruce agrees to speak at Zola's press conference for convicted felons; and Maxine helps Sean over some rough spots as Eric's foster father.

Maxine incurs the wrath of the mothers in Lauren's carpool; Amy fears her parenting skills will be called into question when a family-relations officer visits her home as part of Michael's custody suit; Kyle and Lily try to locate a man Lily misdiagnosed and prematurely released from the hospital; Maxine feels Sean's new relationship with a new foster mother is inappropriate; substituting in probate court, Amy rules on whether a mother can have her son declared legally dead despite the father's hope that the boy, who disappeared four years earlier, is still alive.

Amy must decide whether a teenager is responsible for the death of an infant she was babysitting; Maxine investigates an abuse case at the home of a disabled veteran and his adopted granddaughter; Kyle is torn between keeping his lucrative job as a pharmaceutical rep or accepting a residency at a low-ranked hospital; Amy has an alarm system installed in the house as her stalker escalates his harassment; Maxine and Peter are at odds after Maxine attributes Peter's promotion within the ranks of a Revolutionary War reenactment group to the publicity surrounding her engagement to Jared.