”Just Emotions – Unfolding legal decision-making in court”

The ideals of objectivity, impartiality and independence make up the foundation of a democratic rule of law and are vital for reproducing public trust in the legal system. However, these ideals are imbued with strong norms of non-emotional rationality that run counter to current knowledge about decision-making processes, begging the question how emotions inform legal decision-making in actual practice. JUSTEMOTIONS is an ongoing research project that explores, with ethnographic methods, the emotive-cognitive processes of legal evaluation and judging in criminal cases in Sweden, Italy, USA and Scotland.

In this talk, I will present some conceptual developments and empirical results from the project, focusing how emotions guide and motivate rational inferences in legal decision making and how legal professionals make independent decisions within a collective social order.

Stina Bergman Blix is professor of Sociology at Uppsala University. She currently leads an ERC-funded project JUSTEMOTIONS and she is co-founder and leader of the research group Emotion-Justice-Interaction (EmoJI) at the Department of Sociology.