There is something poetic about legal judgments on personal matters. Perhaps there has to be, because it is the poetic and the artistic, that we turn to in order to articulate the intangible and tangled up qualities of human desire and conflict. As if in extension of this, judges often quote poetry and some have also written actual poems in their judgments.

We also remain endlessly fascinated by courtroom drama and court judgments on personal life because they demonstrate democracy at work through subjective processes—the intangible but real world of ideas, emotions and principles—alongside the empircal and public world of elections. After all, our lives are an interweave of these two realities–social identities, public notions of power and rights and the unpredictable, private self. In the constant dance and argument of these parts, lies change, and democratic possibility.