I am a lawyer with a specialty in family law and children's rights. I have spent most of the past decade in family courts, usually representing children in custody and visitation disputes. I have seen the point that Lithwick is making here proven, over and over again. The family court judge I appear before most often is positively brilliant at making people feel heard and understood in these terrible struggles, to such a degree that more than once I have seen people thank him for deciding against them. This may be because he is a wise and careful man. Or it may be because, in his personal life, he has survived divorces and custody battles himself.

It's easy to sneer at this essential judicial skill as "talk therapy" but such judges are nothing like therapists and do not pretend to be. It's not about therapy. A court is a place where you are supposed to be heard. That's why they call it a "hearing." A judge who can truly listen, fully and attentively, to both sides, and (this is important) who can get across to both sides that he is listening, helps people live with the consequences of his or her decisions. This matters in every court, but so much more in family court, where the judges' decisions go straight to the cores of people's lives and reverberate there for decades after the court has moved on to the next case.

Somebody suggested less listening and more absolute law. Judges would be the first to embrace such a solution, which would take some of the brutal weight of these impossible decisions off their shoulders. But it can't happen. No law is absolute because people aren't absolute. No area of the law is less absolute than family disputes. Let's say you have split parents with shared custody of a little girl too young to talk. Let's say there's a frantic mother claims that the father is sexually abusing the child. Let's say there's a little ambiguous evidence for this claim -- some redness maybe in the diaper area, some anxiety on the baby's part at transition, maybe some iffy stuff in the father's past that might but doesn't definitely suggest that he could be capable of such a thing -- but nothing medically certain, nothing clear or definite. Let's say that on the other side you have a father who insists frantically that he loves the baby and that the mother is making it all up in order to get sole custody of the child. (This scenario is not at all unusual, by the way.) And you, lucky you, are the judge. What absolute are you going to find anywhere that will help you figure out which you have here: a guilty father and innocent, protective mother; an innocent father and over-anxious but well-intentioned mother; or an innocent father and a scheming, lying mother? It could be any of the above, and often is. The only way you are going to figure it out is to listen and listen and listen, and even then, you are quite possibly going to be wrong. Forget absolutes -- they simply don't apply. There aren't any. Now, decide!