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 presides over the sentencing hearing of an emotionally immature teenager convicted of the murder of a ten year old girl during a drive-by shooting; Vincent is shot when he attempts to rescue a woman who's being assaulted; Maxine investigates a mother who claims that she was abducted by aliens; a divorced couple asks Amy to resolve a dispute about the care of their five-day-old son.

Amy juggles preparing Thanksgiving dinner, being on call, and coping with a surprise announcement from Michael; Gillian asks Maxine for help in financing another in-vitro procedure; Amy presides over an adoption in which the biological father shows up at the last minute to claim his child; Hillary tries to settle the score with Vincent during a Thanksgiving party at Alan's; Amy sentences two boys convicted of animal cruelty.

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.

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.

Amy threatens to remove a young boy from the custody of a father who asserts his right to beat his son regularly with a belt, leaving welts; Maxine becomes frustrated by her ever-increasing case load and a system that doesn't seem to care about the children it should be serving as she struggles to get placements for two orphaned and mentally ill siblings; Gillian and Peter begin the adoptive process; Vincent and Donna work out some roommate issues; Amy's assertiveness in dealing with a judge who disrupts her courtroom lands her a job offer; Donna turns to a reluctant Vincent for advice after her conjugal visit with Oscar goes badly; Lauren goes into a full-tilt brat meltdown when the dancing supply store runs out of her recital costume after Amy waits too long to order it; Amy stays up all night to make the costume after spurning Maxine's offer to help.

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.

Amy must decide if a young boy accused of shaking his infant sister to death is guilty of murder; Maxine fights to keep a 10 year old girl away from her abusive stepfather; Vincent struggles with the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder; Amy finds herself in a sticky situation when she accepts a date with the father of one of Lauren's classmates, and then learns that he's a child advocacy attorney who's scheduled to appear in her court; Vincent gets better acquainted with Lisa.

Amy is assigned to a Judicial Conduct Commission panel which will decide the fate of a judge accused of demanding sexual favors from a prostitute in exchange for a reduced sentence; Maxine faces a culture clash when she tries to help a Yemeni teenager who was stabbed after being accused of dishonoring her family; Amy presides over the case of a woman who fears that her ex-husband may have abducted their children; Vincent's book is published and reviewed by The New York Times; Evie moves in temporarily with Maxine and Amy, and proves to be quite a handful; Michael's parents come to visit Lauren, and rebuff Amy's attempts to discuss the divorce.

Amy gears up for the custody battle over Lauren; Vincent takes a job at the local newspaper to help him overcome a severe case of writer's block; Amy suffers from a bad bout of insomnia that's coupled with some interesting dreams in the few hours that she's able to sleep; Maxine investigates why a boy from a loving family persists in sleepwalking far from home; Amy decides the fate of a teenaged athlete when her parents disagree on how her gymnastics training is affecting her life; Lauren and Amy have an ongoing battle over bedtime; Amy must decide if she'll allow the children of combative parents to be represented by their own attorney.

Amy must decide if a brain-injured woman is fit to be a mother; Maxine discovers that a teenaged client is being abused by his therapist; Leisha meets Amy, and faces her ire for piercing Lauren's ears without permission; Vincent and Maxine clash over his journalism career; Amy faces a class of insufferable law students when she's asked to teach a seminar at Yale; Donna takes modeling herself after Amy a bit too far when she begins to show up for work dressed and coiffed exactly like her mentor; it's all bark and no bite when Amy decides to dismiss the case of a drug dealer sniffed out by a four-legged member of the neighborhood watch.

Amy presides over a custody case between a young girl's stepfather and her biological father, whose severe case of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder may interfere with his parenting ability; after an unsuccessful experiment with day trading puts holes in her financial situation, Maxine has difficulty fixing the holes in her roof; the court reporter from hell, who is also Donna's nemesis, is assigned to Amy's courtroom; Maxine uncovers systematic fraud at D.C.F. that leads directly to Susie's desk; Amy realizes that she needs to assume more of the financial burden at home after she and Peter quarrel over their mother's monetary predicament; Vincent and Lisa work through their relationship fears; Amy orders D.C.F. to cut through the bureaucracy and the paperwork so that Croatian refugees can find a home and be reunited with their son.

Heeding the request of counsel to deliver one of her ""rants"" at a sentencing hearing, Amy lectures a young drug dealer whose mother has made tremendous sacrifices to provide him with a better life; much to Peter's dismay, Maxine accepts a date from an attractive man she meets at the diner; Amy gets ""backwater detail"" subbing for another judge, and travels with Bruce to a small town to hear a case centered on the misdiagnosis and overmedication of its teenage boys; as her abductor's case comes to trial, Lisa and Vincent argue when her fears for the possibility of acquittal, and thus her safety, increase; pending the outcome of an investigation, Susie is back at work after a one week paid suspension and, over Maxine's objections, sets in motion a chain of events which eventually leads to the death of a young mother; Amy and Bruce have divergent reactions when confronted with intolerance during their trip; Maxine unsuccessfully tries to resign, and ends up being blackmailed into acceptin

Amy decides the fate of two teenagers arrested for possession of a date rape drug; Greta returns to work with a newfound appreciation of her spirituality, causing Amy to question her own; while working on the case of a neglectful mother, Maxine discovers that management isn't all that it's cracked up to be, especially when it gets in the way of her time with Jared; Donna ropes Amy into having coffee with Leisha, who in turn ropes Amy into going shopping for bathing suits; Vincent breaks up with Lisa after she perjures herself on the stand; after Donna delivers some very sad news, Amy seeks some answers, and some consolation, at Bruce's church.

Maxine gets a new supervisor at D.C.F.; Donna becomes stressed when Oscar's attorneys petition to have his conviction reversed; Amy and Maxine are at odds over having Maxine's terminally ill client testify in a case that Amy is hearing; Vincent counsels Donna against telling Oscar about her attraction to other men, and reassures her that her feelings are normal.

Vincent is injured in an explosion when he attempts to dissuade an old friend threatening to blow up the court house after he loses custody of his sons in Amy's court; Charles accuses Maxine of being a golddigger; Donna discovers that she's pregnant; after Ian files a complaint against Amy and Bruce, alleging that they have an improper relationship, Bruce transfers to another courtroom for the duration of the investigation; Maxine's efforts to reunite a mother with her children are sabotaged by her client.

After going on the date from hell with a Yale professor, Amy has one last fling with Michael the day their divorce becomes final; Maxine returns a stowaway boy to his mother; when Donna and Vincent persuade a reluctant Evie to deliver her baby in the hospital instead of home, she insists that they, instead of Gillian and Peter, act as her birthing coaches; Amy assigns a unique condition of probation to a bright and feisty teenager; Maxine fears that she's contracted Alzheimer's after suffering cognitive lapses, and is relieved to discover that it's only a concussion sustained when she bumped her head on a piece of furniture; Evie's son is born, surprising the family with his interracial heritage.

Maxine unwittingly provides Amy with the information she needs to decide whether promoters are responsible for the death of a teenager who died from an ecstasy overdose during one of their raves; Maxine and Sean join forces to persuade a couple to take back their former foster child after she's released from work camp; Amy and Maxine disagree about Amy's being overprotective of Lauren; Sean lets Maxine know he's angry about her judgemental attitude toward Eric; after conferring with Martin, Kyle decides to pursue a romance with Heather; Kyle goes off the wagon when he and Heather throw a party to celebrate their successful evaluations; after Lily sees them kissing at the party, she decides not to reveal that a random drug test is being conducted the next day, and Heather is fired; Bruce distances himself from Amy in an effort to convince Zola that there's nothing going on between them.

Lauren announces to the family that she has decided to become a vegetarian. Amy has a confrontation with Lauren's spiked-haired friend Reagan about the issue when Reagan and her brother stop by to take Lauren to school. Amy hears a case in which a teenage boy is accused of assaulting his mother and locking her in the basement. The boy admits that his mother beat his pit bull to death and also used to leave him home alone when he was a small child. Maxine investigates a child abuse allegation involving an autistic child. The child was screaming a lot because he missed his mom's boyfriend. Peter becomes concerned about what Gillian did during their separation. They decide to drop the issue and make up.

Amy asks Bruce to set her up with his friend, but it doesn't go quite the way she planned; Amy hears cases involving a woman who breastfeeds her 6 year old son and a couple who can't decide whether to send their ""mute"" daughter to therapy; Maxine goes to bat for an unhappy spelling bee champ; Gillian obsesses about getting Ned into an exclusive preschool.

Jonathan Ashworth joins the Sanctuary House team and manages to ruffle everyone's feathers; Amy tries unsuccessfully to displace some doubts about her relationship with Rob onto Maxine, but is finally forced to confront reality; Bruce quarrels with Winnie over their mother's move; Maxine is displeased at the methods Jonathan uses to engineer the arrest and conviction of the Roseland pedophile; Amy hears the case of a boy with gender identity disorder whose parents are charged with educational neglect for keeping him out of school after he's harassed by his classmates.

Amy hears the case of a disturbed teenager who successfully impersonated a police officer at a high school for several months, carrying a loaded gun, and who was only discovered after being arrested for severely beating a student he suspected of being a drug dealer; while Maxine is deciding whether a mother who is being released from prison for killing one of her children should be returned to her family, Kyle helps her uncover some medical information that may give credence to the woman's claim of innocence; Kyle and Brian have a run-in over Kyle's way with Teen Harbor's clients, and Kyle learns an expensive lesson about street kids; as Amy is about to rule in the matter of two teenagers accused of stealing a stop sign and contributing to an accident which seriously injured a man and left him in a coma, she receives word in open court that the man has died, prompting a startling admission from one of the accused; after Lauren walks in on Kyle having sex, Gillian volunteers to help hi

Maxine reluctantly allows Eric to stay at her house when she's unable to find him the right placement; Amy makes a second date with Barry; Kyle helps a former drug addict who goes to extremes to find an apartment; Amy hears the case of a teen who is suing a tobacco company for causing his emphysema; Gillian's effort to expand her knowledge of black culture doesn't go so well.

No description available

Amy finds herself fending off Nick's advances and agonizes over whether she should tell Lolly; Maxine assists a detective in tracking down an undocumented Cambodian boy's parents; Amy rules on a case involving a teenager who refuses to attend school after the principal discontinues the gay pride club on campus.