A judge hears thousands of cases—but when a 16-year-old begs to stay with his little brother, one truth breaks through and changes everything

seconds of case four thousand three hundred and one.

The case was a guardianship.

This too was part of the work — not just the criminal cases people imagined when they thought of courtrooms, but these: the cases that arrived from the cracks between institutions, from the spaces no system had been designed to fill. A family continue reading …