What place do reason and emotion have in justice and the law? This thought-provoking text brings together leading lawyers and legal philosophers to argue that law gains legitimacy and effectiveness when reason recognizes and embraces human emotions for the benefit of society as a whole.
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.
This book examines the role and importance of reason and emotion in justice and the law. Eight lawyers and philosophers of law consider law's basis in the universal human need for society, our innate sense of justice, and many other powerful inclinations and emotions, including the desire for fairness and even for law itself. Human beings are deeply social creatures, inspired by social and other emotions, which can ennoble, support, or undermine the law. Law gains legitimacy and effectiveness when reason recognizes and embraces human emotions for the benefit of society as a whole. This volume explores the power and purposes of reason and emotion in the law.
From questions surrounding motives to the concept of crimes of passion, the intersection of emotional states and legal practice has long interested professionals as well as the public—recent cases involving extensive pretrial publicity, highly charged evidence, and instances of jury nullification continue to make the subject particularly timely. With these trends in mind, Emotion and the Law brings a rich tradition in social psychology into sharp forensic focus in a unique interdisciplinary volume. Emotion, mood and affective states, plus patterns of conduct that tend to arise from them in legal contexts, are analyzed in theoretical and practical terms, using real-life examples from criminal and civil cases. From these complex situations, contributors provide answers to bedrock questions—what roles affect plays in legal decision making, when these roles are appropriate, and what can be done so that emotion is not misused or exploited in legal procedures—and offer complementary legal and social/cognitive perspectives on these and other salient issues: Positive versus negative affect in legal decision making, emotion, eyewitness memory, and false memory, the influence of emotions on juror decisions, and legal approaches to its control, a terror management theory approach to the understanding of hate crimes, policy recommendations for managing affect in legal proceedings, additional legal areas that can benefit from the study of emotion. Emotion and the Law clarifies theoretical grey areas, revisits current practice, and suggests possibilities for both new scholarship and procedural guidelines, making it a valuable reference for psycho legal researchers, forensic psychologists, and policymakers.
Although the connection of law, passion and emotion has become an established focus in legal scholarship, the extent to which emotion has always been, and continues to be, a significant influence in informing legal reasoning, decision-making, decision-avoidance and legal judgment - rather than an adjunct - is still a matter for critical analysis. Engaging with the underlying social context in which emotional states are a motivational force - and have produced key legal principles and controversial judgments, as evidenced in a range of illustrative legal cases - Law and the Passions: A Discrete History provides a uniquely inclusive commentary on the significance and influence of emotions in the history and continuing development of legal institutions and legal dogma. Law, it is argued, is a passion; and, as such, it is a primarily emotional endeavour.
Whether or not wrongdoers show remorse and how they show remorse are matters that attract great interest both in law and in popular culture. In capital trials in the United States, it can be a question of life or death whether a jury believes that a wrongdoer showed remorse. And in wrongdoings that capture the popular imagination, public attention focuses not only on the act but on whether the perpetrator feels remorse for what they did. But who decides when remorse should be shown or not shown and whether it is genuine or not genuine? In contrast to previous academic studies on the subject, the primary focus of this work is not on whether the wrongdoer meets these expectations over how and when remorse should be shown but on how the community reacts when these expectations are met or not met. Using examples drawn from Canada, the United States, and South Africa, the author demonstrates that the showing of remorse is a site of negotiation and contention between groups who differ about when it is to be expressed and how it is to be expressed. The book illustrates these points by looking at cases about which there was conflict over whether the wrongdoer should show remorse or whether the feelings that were shown were sincere. Building on the earlier analysis, the author shows that the process of deciding when and how remorse should be expressed contributes to the moral ordering of society as a whole. This book will be of interest to those in the fields of sociology, law, law and society, and criminology.
Constitutional Sentiments provides new insights into the foundations of law, the complexities of legal institutions, and the hidden genealogies of lawmaking. As the book makes clear, constitutions are human creations that embody all aspects of our humanity. It is an example of serious scholarship that will attract readers of all disciplines who have a keen interest in social and political life. --Book Jacket.
What is the role and value of virtue, emotion and imagination in law and legal reasoning? These new essays, by leading scholars of both law and philosophy, offer striking and exploratory answers to this neglected question. The collection takes a holistic approach, inquiring as to the connections and relations between virtue, emotion and imagination. In addition to the principal focus on adjudication, essays in the collection also engage with a variety of different legal, political and moral contexts: eg criminal law sentencing, the Black Lives Matter movement and professional ethics. A number of different areas of the law are addressed (eg criminal law, constitutional law and tort law) and the issues explored include: the benefits and limits of empathy in legal reasoning; the role of attention and perception in judicial reasoning;, the identification of judicial virtues (such as compassion and humility) and judicial vices (such as callousness and partiality); the values and dangers of certain imaginative devices (eg personification); and the interactive and social dimensions of virtue, emotion and imagination.
This Handbook presents thirty-one state-of-the-art contributions from the most notable writers on philosophy of emotion today. Anyone working on the nature of emotion, its history, or its relation to reason, self, value, or art, whether at the level of research or advanced study, will find the book an unrivalled resource and a fascinating read.