Writing Histories of Law and Emotion

Making Independent Decisions Together: Rational Emotions in Legal Adjudication

“…This view connects to the ideal of positivistic objectivity, which implies that legal professionals should and could view and review the world at a distance, putting aside their emotions and values. The ideal of “judicial dispassion” (Maroney 2011) has been contested by scholars from a range of disciplines, creating a separate research field (Bailey and Knight 2017; Bandes and Blumenthal 2012; Grossi 2015; Maroney 2016; Wiener, Bornstein, and Voss 2006). Law and emotion scholarship covers a multitude of perspectives and aspects of law and legal work, such as the role of emotion in law‐making and legal doctrine (Bianchi and Saab 2019; Nussbaum 1999); expectations concerning defendants' and victims' emotions (Konradi 1999; Rose, Nadler, and Clark 2006; Weisman 2016); and the emotion work of legal professionals (Bergman Blix and Wettergren 2018; Kolb 2011; Roach Anleu and Mack 2005).…”

“…Third, historical research has illustrated how relational arrangements in society as a whole also influence legal ideals (Bailey and Knight 2017). Impartial detachment is valued today, but even recent historical examples, such as the “revolutionary justice” of the early Soviet state, instead portray moral emotion and empathy as being essential to legal decision‐making (Vasilyev 2017).…”

Introduction: New Approaches to Late Medieval Court Records

“…Countering scholarship that assumes a fundamental gap between premodern emotional-uncivilized and modern rational-civilized ways of being, anthropologically-minded historians have come to use court records explicitly to bridge the gap between premodern and modern experiences of life. Thus within the field of the history of emotions many authors have identified court records as key sources to understanding the cultural, social and legal logic behind expressed emotions in a time far from our own (Smail, 2001;Hyams, 2003;Bailey and Knight, 2017). In a similar vein, interest in the performative aspects of social life has led historians to read court records primarily as forms of communication between contemporaries.…”