A MEMOIR
YOUR VERDICT: A Judge’s Reckoning with Law and Loss
A story about judgment rendered in courtrooms, within families, and ultimately within ourselves.
WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT
Your Verdict: A Judge’s Reckoning With Law and Loss is Jacqueline St. Joan’s deeply personal examination of judgment: rendered from the bench, delivered within families, and ultimately reclaimed through a lifetime of reflection.
Across more than five decades, St. Joan moves through Denver courtrooms, feminist newsrooms, law school classrooms, and the intimate terrain of marriage and family. Rising from welfare mother to judge, she explores how justice operates not only as legal principle, but as something profoundly human, shaped by race, loyalty, fear, love, and conscience.
From the bench, she presided over cases involving abortion access, domestic violence, protest, and public controversy. Beyond the courtroom, as a woman, activist, and partner in an interracial marriage her family struggled to accept, she faced another kind of judgment altogether.
But this is not a story about easy answers or tidy resolutions. It is a searching inquiry into integrity: what it means to live by our convictions, to hold authority without losing humanity, and to ask who ultimately renders the final verdict on a life.
What People Are Saying
“Jacqueline St. Joan writes as someone who spent decades pushing against doors that weren’t meant to open — first as a lawyer, then as a judge. As a woman, she was unwilling to make herself smaller to keep the peace. Your Verdict traces the battles that shaped her, both in the courtroom and in her own life, and she’s honest about the toll.”
— Fawn Germer, journalist, author of Hard Won Wisdom and Coming Back
“We don’t have books like this, because no one has had the courage to court eviction from the tribe, until Jacqueline St. Joan.”
— Alexandra Fuller, author of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight
“Ms. St. Joan, a highly regarded writer was a controversial Denver judge during the turbulent 80s. With insight and honesty, she weaves her past into the telling of her most controversial court cases.”
— Harry MacLean, lawyer and author of Starkweather and In Broad Daylight