Judging And Emotion

Judging and Emotion investigates how judicial officers understand, experience, display, manage and deploy emotions in their everyday work, in light of their fundamental commitment to impartiality. Judging and Emotion challenges the conventional assumption that emotion is inherently unpredictable, stressful or a personal quality inconsistent with impartiality. Extensive empirical research with Australian judicial officers demonstrates the ways emotion, emotional capacities and emotion work are integral to judicial practice. Judging and Emotion articulates a broader conception of emotion, as a social practice emerging from interaction, and demonstrates how judicial officers undertake emotion work and use emotion as a resource to achieve impartiality. A key insight is that institutional requirements, including conceptions of impartiality as dispassion, do not completely determine the emotion dimensions of judicial work. Through their everyday work, judicial officers construct and maintain the boundaries of an impartial judicial role which necessarily incorporates emotion and emotion work. Building on a growing interest in emotion in law and social sciences, this book will be of considerable importance to socio-legal scholars, sociologists, the judiciary, legal practitioners and all users of the courts.

Shortlisted for the British Psychological Society Book Award (Academic Monograph category) 2014! A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2013! Psychological research shows that our emotions and feelings often guide the moral decisions we make about our own lives and the social groups to which we belong. But should we be concerned that our important moral judgments can be swayed by "hot" passions, such as anger, disgust, guilt, shame and sympathy? Aren’t these feelings irrational and counterproductive? Using a functional conflict theory of emotions (FCT), Giner-Sorolla proposes that each emotion serves a number of different functions, sometimes inappropriately, and that moral emotions in particular are intimately tied to problems faced by the individuals in a group, and by groups interacting with each other. Specifically, the author suggests that these emotions help us, as individuals and group members, to: Appraise developments in the environment Learn through association Regulate our own behavior Communicate convincingly with others. Drawing on extensive research, including many studies from the author’s own lab, this book shows why emotions work to encourage reasonable moral behaviour, and why they sometimes fail. This is the first single-authored volume in the field of psychology dedicated to a separate examination of the major moral and positive emotions. As such, the book is ideal reading for researchers, postgraduates and undergraduates of social psychology, sociology, philosophy and politics.

This comprehensive overview presents cutting-edge research on the fast-expanding field of interpersonal perception.

This book examines social aspects of humour relating to the judiciary, judicial behaviour, and judicial work across different cultures and eras, identifying how traditionally recorded wit and humorous portrayals of judges reflect social attitudes to the judiciary over time. It contributes to cultural studies and social science/socio-legal studies of both humour and the role of emotions in the judiciary and in judging. It explores the surprisingly varied intersections between humour and the judiciary in several legal systems: judges as the target of humour; legal decisions regulating humour; the use of humour to manage aspects of judicial work and courtroom procedure; and judicial/legal figures and customs featuring in comic and satiric entertainment through the ages. Delving into the multi-layered connections between the seriousness of the work of the judiciary on the one hand, and the lightness of humour on the other hand, this fascinating collection will be of particular interest to scholars of the legal system, the criminal justice system, humour studies, and cultural studies.

This special issue of Oñati Socio-Legal Series, titled Judging, Emotion and Emotion Work, is the result of presentations and discussions during an interdisciplinary workshop at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law (IISL) held in May 2018. This issue builds on the growing critique of the dispassionate ideal of judicial work, combining original theoretical insights with imaginative empirical analyses to extend the understanding of emotion in judging. Fifteen articles are presented in four themes: Theoretical, cultural and historical perspectives; Tensions of the dispassionate ideal; Social dynamics of emotion in judging; and Research methods, empirical insights and [changing] judicial practice. The international diversity of contributions recognises similarities and differences in the structure and organization of courts and the judiciary, and socio-cultural variations in emotional experience and expression.

Emotions, Values, and the Law brings together ten of John Deigh's essays written over the past fifteen years. In the first five essays, Deigh ask questions about the nature of emotions and the relation of evaluative judgment to the intentionality of emotions, and critically examines the cognitivist theories of emotion that have dominated philosophy and psychology over the past thirty years. A central criticism of these theories is that they do not satisfactorily account for the emotions of babies or animals other than human beings. Drawing on this criticism, Deigh develops an alternative theory of the intentionality of emotions on which the education of emotions explains how human emotions, which innately contain no evaluative thought, come to have evaluative judgments as their principal cognitive component. The second group of five essays challenge the idea of the voluntary as essential to understanding moral responsibility, moral commitment, political obligation, and other moral and political phenomena that have traditionally been thought to depend on people's will. Each of these studies focuses on a different aspect of our common moral and political life and shows, contrary to conventional opinion, that it does not depend on voluntary action or the exercise of a will constituted solely by rational thought. Together, the essays in this collection represent an effort to shift our understanding of the phenomena traditionally studied in moral and political philosophy from that of their being products of reason and will, operating independently of feeling and sentiment to that of their being manifestations of the work of emotion. "Deigh's writing is clear and precise, his arguments are strong, and he uses a wide range of real world examples that give his essays a vibrant and very readable character." - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews "I believe that Deigh is as clear-headed and insightful a philosopher as is currently at work today in the areas of moral, political, and legal philosophy and moral psychology, and I believe these essays beautifully demonstrate his many virtues." - Herbert Morris, University of California, Low Angeles Law School "[John Deigh] has acquired a very good knowledge of a field which he has very much made his own. No one writes better or thinks more productively on that area of thought where the theory of the emotions, psychoanalysis, value theory, and the theory of law intersect. And if we closely connect the name Deigh with this particular concatenation of topics, I believe that very soon there will be a number of voices clamoring to be heard in this area." - Richard Wollheim, University of California, Berkeley

A judge’s role is to make decisions. This book is about how judges undertake this task. It is about forces on the judicial role and their consequences, about empirical research from a variety of academic disciplines that observes and verifies how factors can affect how judges judge. On the one hand, judges decide by interpreting and applying the law, but much more affects judicial decision-making: psychological effects, group dynamics, numerical reasoning, biases, court processes, influences from political and other institutions, and technological advancement. All can have a bearing on judicial outcomes. In How Judges Judge: Empirical Insights into Judicial Decision-Making, Brian M. Barry explores how these factors, beyond the law, affect judges in their role. Case examples, judicial rulings, judges’ own self-reflections on their role and accounts from legal history complement this analysis to contextualise the research, make it more accessible and enrich the reader’s understanding and appreciation of judicial decision-making. Offering research-based insights into how judges make the decisions that can impact daily life and societies around the globe, this book will be of interest to practising and training judges, litigation lawyers and those studying law and related disciplines.

This illuminating Research Handbook analyses the role that emotions play and ought to play in legal reasoning and practice, rejecting the simplistic distinction between reason and emotion.

Professional Emotions in Court examines the paramount role of emotions in the legal professions and in the functioning of the democratic judicial system. Based on extensive interview and observation data in Sweden, the authors highlight the silenced background emotions and the tacitly habituated emotion management in the daily work at courts and prosecution offices. Following participants ‘backstage’ – whether at the office or at lunch – in order to observe preparations for and reflections on the performance in court itself, this book sheds light on the emotionality of courtroom interactions, such as professional collaboration, negotiations, and challenges, with the analysis of micro-interactions being situated in the broader structural regime of the legal system – the emotive-cognitive judicial frame – throughout. A demonstration of the false dichotomy between emotion and reason that lies behind the assumption of a judicial system that operates rationally and without emotion, Professional Emotions in Court reveals how this assumption shapes professionals’ perceptions and performance of their work, but hampers emotional reflexivity, and questions whether the judicial system might gain in legitimacy if the role of emotional processes were recognized and reflected upon.

Interpersonal sensitivity refers to the accuracy and/or appropriateness of perceptions, judgments, and responses we have with respect to one another. It is relevant to nearly all aspects of social relations and has long been studied by social, personality, and clinical psychologists. Until now, however, no systematic or comprehensive treatment of this complex concept has been attempted. In this volume the major theorists and researchers of interpersonal sensitivity describe their approaches both critically and integratively. Specific tests and methods are presented and evaluated. The authors address issues ranging from the practical to the broadly theoretical and discuss future challenges. Topics include sensitivity to deception, emotion, personality, and other personal characteristics; empathy; the status of self-reports; dyadic interaction procedures; lens model approaches; correlational and categorical measurement approaches; thin-slice and variance partitioning methodologies; and others. This volume offers the single most comprehensive treatment to date of this widely acknowledged but often vaguely operationalized and communicated social competency.