Maybe one can, depending on the circumstances? But not always. Family law is legendary for producing results that would be unheard of in a regular civil law court.
I have seen plenty of bad cases where the winning party was not winning and had in fact lost many rounds in the case over time.
Family law is universally hated by many attorneys who would never do the work we do. Probably because most of the time, they don't like to listen to moaning, groaning, griping, and maybe even bitching about the case?? Well, then that's obvious that those attorneys should not do family law.
This is nothing new; when I was in Sacramento working on a civil case, the sheriff deputies told me that family law is usually where someone will try and kill another person--not in criminal law cases; for example, when the jail inmates are brought into the courthouse, they usually walk single file in a line close to the wall, and deputies escort them. I am sure not all the criminal defendants are allowed to be escorted as stated, those are likely lower status crimes. Although bailiffs are usually inside every courtroom, one bailiff alone could not likely control a group of people who were in attendance in a case which was exceptionally newsworthy.
That is basically why courts started the weapons scanner at all courthouses. In San Diego, people would be killing their ex wife, but not in the courthouse. They would do arson to the house/just burn it down while the spouse was in the house? Or further South, by Seal Beach, the ex husband ran into the beauty shop and killed about 8 people, including the ex wife? Defendants have even killed the family law attorney that ended up winning the case... this is not surprising. In fact, in family law when the stakes are very high, meaning one party stands to lose nearly everything (which is usually the husband-) some husbands just cannot stand that and will do some pretty outrageous things. Attorney herein would be willing to bet that some of those husbands were war veterans, or were already victims or subject to some type of mental distress.
Of course not every case has domestic violence, but these days, the domestic violence cases are rising in part, due to the problems involving no jobs, difficulty in accessing courthouse, COVID and unemployment, all of which create excessive stress for most litigants.
In fact, even the Korean pop band (BIGBANG) in their video "Haru Haru", https://youtu.be/MzCbEdtNbJ0 it clearly shows the distress that even men will go through, regardless of what caused the distress....attorney herein does not speak or know any
Korean language..you dont't need to know the language to understand what happened in the video.
The loss, grief, and feeling of loss for most people in divorce (or even in just break-ups) is very high. To ignore that would be foolish. Understanding this fact can sometimes actually help a case along; one might be surprised at how a case can be resolved if one understands the human nature factor.
