At the end of a long workday, I watched the last plaintiff come to the podium. On my right, her boy and girl wandered into the courtroom, hovering on the sidelines, looking out the window, listening, turning their backs to us, as if by making us invisible to them, they were making themselves invisible to us. I thought they wanted to hear her tell their story. They were restless, and so was I. The baby settled in her mother’s left arm, and its neck relaxed backward over her elbow, drifting to sleep. And her story, which had been closeted and contained for so long, began to unfold.

“We’re from Texas,” she announced. “He brought us here last August.” She stopped. Her voice was cracking, and her large hands were pulling the baby’s tiny fingers away from the microphone that they continuously reached out to touch. She was alone. She had no lawyer. Across the aisle, the man she was going to accuse sat beside his lawyer, expressionless.

“Two days ago, he cornered me in the bedroom. He pushed me down, was squeezing my neck. I couldn’t breathe, and he told me the only way he’ll ever get rid of me is if he kills me now. Then he started talking about killing himself.” She looks distressed, adding, “And the children were in the room the whole time.”

Then a lawyer presented the man’s version of events—that she was making the whole story up—and when the arguments ended, the room fell silent. I looked out from the bench and saw two lonely people trying to share their interior worlds that could not be completely shared, even with the best of lawyers doing their very best. Everyone looked up toward the bench. Everyone was seeking a response from the judge. Everyone was waiting for me.

This is a lonely moment people rarely imagine when they think about judging: the awareness that you are in a moment when human experience cannot be shared fully. From the outside, the job doesn’t look lonely. Courtrooms are often crowed with activity. Lawyers confer at counsel tables. Litigants sit anxiously beside them. Clerks manage files, bailiffs keep order and family members watch from the gallery.

Yet the one person who must decide what happens next sits alone in that moment of responsibility. Anyone who has faced a difficult decision knows the feeling—advice may come from many directions, but when it comes down to it, the duty to decide and to speak falls on you. A keen solitude arises from the necessity of judgment, which also sharpens awareness to strip away noisy emotions and doubt to reveal a confidence where clarity arises.

What matters to you must matter at home or in relation to a loved one. And for those reasons, what matters must be spoken. But what matters in a judge’s lonely moment may not be appropriate in a courtroom, where it should have no path into words on the record. Maybe, apart from the formal evidence, as a judge, you sense something from your own past—your mother’s false accusations against your father or your father’s abuse when you lived in Texas as a child. In a real relationship, these ghosts matter; but on the bench, they cannot.

As I looked out over the quiet courtroom, I had to wonder whether it was rubbing off on me—the loneliness of these two people who once had loved each other (and maybe still did) but whose present needs overrode their commitments to loyalty, to protection, to consideration of the other. The echo of their connection to each other was fading, and I could barely hear it. And maybe that was a good thing.

I learned about judicial loneliness early in my years as a Denver County judge. The law itself was not difficult. It required me to weigh credibility and determine whether the evidence met a specific legal standard. It did not ask whether testimony suggested deeper suffering that could not easily be proved in a short hearing. And I ruled, weighing credibility, applying the law and still feeling a sense of all that the law cannot repair.

When the decision must finally be announced, the judge must speak with visible confidence, so that litigants will believe the person on the bench has mastered the task at hand. The authority of the court depends on that belief.

Occasionally, the responsibility became heavier because the case carried public attention. In one widely discussed matter during my years on the bench, reporters filled the back rows of the courtroom. Lawyers knew that whatever decision emerged would be examined far beyond the courthouse walls. Yet the process inside the courtroom remained the same: Scrutiny be damned, we followed the familiar path: testimony, argument, law, ruling alone from the bench. Public scrutiny can deepen the solitude of judging.

Loneliness is part of the human condition, and its recognition in oneself can deepen judicial empathy. Once someone has known what it feels like to stand alone—with grief, doubt or responsibility—they may become more attentive to the quiet struggles of others. In that sense, it reminds us that every life contains an interior landscape that cannot be fully shared. But it also reminds us why connection matters because even brief moments of being understood can lighten the weight of that solitude.

Over time, what remains with a judge is not only a record of rulings but a memory of the people who passed through the courtroom: those who hoped the law would protect them, those who feared it might not, and those who sought justice in circumstances where justice itself could only do so much. The independence of the judiciary depends on judges being willing to carry that burden of incompleteness. But every judge eventually learns a quieter truth beneath the authority of the robe. The courtroom may be full, yet the act of judging is both a public act and a private reckoning.

I still remember the young woman in that protection order hearing who stood before the court asking the law to help restore a sense of safety in her life. When the arguments ended and the room fell silent, the task of answering her request belonged to me. That is the quiet truth of judging, as loneliness is a truth of the human condition—the quiet space between one life and another, where the longing for connection begins.

Jacqueline St. Joan is a retired lawyer, judge and law professor whose novels, essays and poetry give voice to a search for justice shaped by compassion. Her memoir, Your Verdict: A Judge’s Reckoning With Law and Loss, is forthcoming from Golden Antelope Press in spring 2026.

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