Stina Bergman Blix has won ERC Starting Grant

This is the first comprehensive empirical study of how objectivity is constructed in different legal systems. By examining how emotions operate in decision-making, it is possible to make objectivity work explicit and available for conscious reflection, gaining important knowledge of a rational process that hitherto has been understood as exclusively cognitive. Conventionally, objectivity is seen a process of reason that can be performed without using emotions. However, emotions are drivers of social action, and therefore inherent to the process of constructing objectivity. Rational decision-making requires facilitating emotions, for instance interest in the task and motivating emotions, for instance professional pride in correct procedures and distaste for waste of time, as well as the ability to ’feel’ the consequences of alternative actions. For legal actors, this means that objective decision-making relies on emotional information and that emotional sensibility influences allocation of culpability.

Through a comparative and multi method qualitative design we will study the decision-making process from prosecution, lower court, to the court of appeal in four countries, Sweden, Scotland, USA and Italy, representing different legal systems (common and civil criminal law) and varying in emotional expressiveness (e.g. the Swedish subtle emotional regime versus the more expressive Italian). By contrasting decisions of three legal types (fraud, domestic abuse, and homicide) in different legal instances and in different countries, the aim is to identify and describe a more general decision-making process based on actual practice.