Tender Years Presumption

It's 1978. Ernest Schreiber has just taken on the most difficult case of his short career-a child custody claim by a father. If he loses this one, a young baby will face a life of emotional abuse by his mother who suffers from a severe personality disorder. In a rational and just world that should be a no-brainer. But he doesn't work in a rational world. He's a lawyer, and he works in the world of jurisprudence and in the courtroom of Judge Oliver Wendell White where neither reason nor justice exists when it comes to fathers trying to get custody of a baby. Ole Whitey always favors mothers regardless of their faults, and he hates Ernest. To make matters worse, Ernest's client is a young, white graduate student from Norway, and the mother is a poor, black woman from the Deep South who is practiced in the use of race as a weapon.