How can I stop layers accidentally deselecting when an empty space is clicked in the Layers panel?

I’m like melissapiccone, I use layer deselection to my advantage.

One reason it doesn’t bother me is that this is not just a Layers panel behavior. “Deselect on click in empty area” happens in all list panels in Photoshop: Actions, Gradients, Colors, Patterns… Not only that, this behavior is how most list panels in many applications have worked, for more than 30 years. The Layers panels in InDesign and Illustrator work this way too. It’s based on the “click in an empty area to deselect” behavior that some people first saw in applications like Adobe Illustrator in the late 1980s.

So there have been a lot of people over the decades who have an ingrained knowledge that clicking in an empty area deselects, and if they don’t want to deselect things, avoid clicking in an empty area.

Because of all that, if this is to be a feature request, I don’t think it should be about the Layers panel alone. At the very least, it would have to be an application-wide preference in Photoshop, affecting all list panels consistently. But so many users have such a long memory of being able to deselect by clicking in an empty area that if it was disabled, it would also make Photoshop panels inconsistent with over 35 years of object selection and list panel behavior in many applications, Adobe and non-Adobe.