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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

As the Gray family tries to cope with the aftermath of the explosion, Maxine cuts back on her workload to help Vincent through his difficult recovery, while Amy realizes that she's still harboring resentment towards Vincent for putting himself in danger to save her life; Gillian takes a forceful approach to Maxine's avoiding Ned; Amy hires an attorney to counter Ian's accusations; Maxine ducks Jared's calls on Edward's birthday; Amy's new C.S.O. is everything that Bruce is not; Vincent's reluctance to leave the hospital causes him to conceal his progress from his family; after telling Bruce to lighten his docket, Judge Salinger is displeased to discover that Bruce has transferred a case to Amy hoping that she will render a more just ruling for a young boy caught in a bureaucratic morass; Sean urges Maxine to get back to work by taking on several sexual abuse cases from the same preschool; Amy refuses to allow a severely depressed mother who is grief-stricken over the recent death of he

Amy must decide whether to remove an eleven year old girl from the custody of her Wanderer parents; Vincent writes an article criticizing the foster care system which gets a frosty reception from his mother and siblings; Maxine is forced to testify for the prosecution during Jodi Larson's trial; Gillian's proposal that the entire Gray family take a formal Christmas portrait is met with a resounding lack of enthusiasm; Bruce mediates a custody modification dispute between a contentious couple.

Evie walks back into Ned's life just as Peter and Gillian are set to adopt him; Maxine deals with a young girl who wants to be adopted before her 18th birthday, and a 12-year-old boy who refuses to be adopted because he believes his birth mother will come back one day.

Maxine contemplates ending her relationship with Jared after meeting his son again, while Amy oversees a case involving a mother who wants to deny visitation rights to her daughter's grandparents; Vincent's decision to quit his job to write a novel unsettles Carole.

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.

The Sanctuary House staff works together to determine the identity of the adult who molested a twelve year old boy who confessed to raping his five year old sister; after Bruce arbitrates a visitation schedule disagreement between a divorced couple and wonders if their child is being abused, Sean offers his help; Carole persuades Vincent to ignore his agent's advice to make his book more commercial; Amy faces a swarmy host and his ignorant, self-serving politician guest as she appears on a tv talk show in defense of the juvenile justice system.

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 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.

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.