Family courts are known as Court of Equity. By common law tradition, judges are given extremely broad discretion to decide cases.
Ideally, it seems to make sense that courts should be free to make decisions based on the unique circumstances of each case.
However, they only hear about 1/3 of the total divorce cases. The rest are settled out-of-court.
Judges can ignore the terms of an existing divorce agreement agreed by both parties. In my case, the judge decided that she was going to ignore ‘the right of first refusal’ language in the divorce agreement.