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The incentive for this chapter emerged in the beginning of the pandemic when we collected data for a comparative research project in three countries whose strategies to combat the COVID-19 virus were strikingly different and often debated: Sweden, Italy, and the United States. Trying to make sense of our subjective feelings as well as the collective feelings we identified in reports and discussions in the media and personal conversations, we found that our efforts were not only therapeutic, but served as illuminating examples of authoritative and public responses that either fragmented or supported emotional communities. The three countries faced the same health hazards, but the authorities’ emotional response and the public’s collective feelings differed. Through individual autoethnographic diaries, observations of press conferences, and joint emotional reflections, we found that our own feelings and our respective countries’ responses were diverse. Employing collaborative autoethnography, and a three-tier analysis strategy, we discuss the observed responses in our respective national contexts during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic and reflect on how public and private experiences coalesce into experiences of both a shared sense of emotional community as well as feelings of emotional estrangement.

Drawing on ethnographic data collected in Italian courts and prosecution offices, this dissertation offers new perspectives on legal decision-making by highlighting the importance of emotions for constructing and evaluating legal narratives. Focusing on criminal cases, it describes and dissects how judges and prosecutors use emotions in reflection and action tied to lay narratives and legal constraints. The analysis shows that legal professionals engage in different types of emotional dynamics when dealing with stories; first, they develop gut feelings, which are either endorsed or kept at distance by means of emotional reflexivity, to comply with legal ideals of objectivity and impartiality. Second, empathy emerges as a crucial tool to direct the interaction with lay people and to interpret legal prerequisites, such as credibility, and intent. Finally, the dissertation shows that lay stories lead legal professionals to become passionate and committed towards the correct application of the law, the restoration of the moral order, and the achievement of justice. In light of the empirical findings, this thesis strives to develop a theoretical understanding of legal decision-making as narrative work that includes emotional dynamics consistent with rational, objective action., Justemotions

Drawing on ethnographic data collected in Italian courts and prosecution offices, this dissertation offers new perspectives on legal decision-making by highlighting the importance of emotions for constructing and evaluating legal narratives. Focusing on criminal cases, it describes and dissects how judges and prosecutors use emotions in reflection and action tied to lay narratives and legal constraints. The analysis shows that legal professionals engage in different types of emotional dynamics when dealing with stories; first, they develop gut feelings, which are either endorsed or kept at distance by means of emotional reflexivity, to comply with legal ideals of objectivity and impartiality. Second, empathy emerges as a crucial tool to direct the interaction with lay people and to interpret legal prerequisites, such as credibility, and intent. Finally, the dissertation shows that lay stories lead legal professionals to become passionate and committed towards the correct application of the law, the restoration of the moral order, and the achievement of justice. In light of the empirical findings, this thesis strives to develop a theoretical understanding of legal decision-making as narrative work that includes emotional dynamics consistent with rational, objective action.

Justemotions

Credibility and intent are among the most recurrent legal categories to be assessed in criminal trials. Even in civil law jurisdictions, where judges and prosecutors abide by detailed rules on how to decide, the law does not offer an answer as to how credibility and intent evaluations should be done in practice. Drawing on analysis of ethnographic data from trials and deliberations collected in Italian courts and prosecution offices, we discuss the emotive-cognitive dynamics at play in judges’ and prosecutors’ evaluation of credibility and intent, focusing on cases of murder, intimate partner violence, and rape. Using sociological concepts of epistemic emotions, emotional reflexivity, empathy, and legal encoding, we show that legal professionals use different practices to either avoid settling on feelings of certainty about credibility and intent when their evaluations are perceived as problematic or to overcome feelings of doubts about said legal categories. In this way, we contribute to the growing body of literature addressing the importance of emotional dynamics in legal decision-making, adding a novel perspective on civil law professionals., Justemotions ERC-757625

The principle of open justice entails transparency of judicial proceedings as a safeguard to the rights of individuals subject to judicial decisions. Many jurisdictions across the world promote this principle in different ways, such as by allowing access to court records and official documentation, to help the public understand courts’ work. Judges’ duty to provide publicly available reasons for their decisions has also been linked to the principle of open justice, considering the reason as the very essence of judicial decision-making. Yet, legal arguments and inferences presented in written judgments do not account for the complexity of the emotive-cognitive process through which judges decide. Drawing on extensive empirical material collected in Italian courts and prosecution offices, this chapter opens a window into the ‘hidden side of justice’: the emotional labour performed by judges and prosecutors when deciding criminal cases. The analysis renders visible the importance of emotion management and emotional reflexivity as professional skills that judges use to problematize and critically evaluate their emotions and knowledge. It also shows how empathy impacts on the development of judicial and prosecutorial decision-making related activities. Overall, the argument advanced in this paper is that emotions and emotional labour are important aspects for the attainment of justice in the form of fair and equal legal proceedings., Justemotions ERC-757625

This paper analyses how, through storytelling, law and emotions intersect when judges and prosecutors present legal narratives about criminal cases. The focus is on the final stage of the criminal legal process, when legal narratives are presented by prosecutors in their closing statements, and by judges in their written judgments. The chapter draws on empirical material collected in Italian courts and prosecutor offices, where fieldwork included observations of hearings and deliberations, shadowing, interviews, and analysis of written judgments. Sociologically, narrative is a category of importance as it refers to the voices of diverse stakeholders interacting with each other, expressing and negotiating their knowledge within the institutional constraints imposed by the legal system. In the judiciary, narratives are declarative evidence presented in competing forms during preliminary investigations and throughout the trial, until their retelling at the appellate level. In this way, narratives undergo a continuous process of transformation and re-evaluation. This chapter focuses on how narratives are transformed by legal professionals, unpacking the entwinement between legal pathos, morality, and justice, whose connection already appears in the Aristotelian theory of persuasive discourses based on pathos (the emotional disposition set by the speech). The current empirical material shows how legal pathos - understood as passionate commitment - emerges in legal narratives in three different situations. First, with the aim of restoring the moral order when the criminal case spurs strong moral indignation; here legal professionals express moral judgments in their narratives, for instance when a prosecutor passionately dwell upon the victim’s consent in a case of rape, to contrast the defensive argument based on provocative behaviour. Second, legal pathos is aimed at restoring justice, when legal professionals express friction between the correct decision (aligned with l

In this conceptual article, we propose that legal professional decision makers’ transformation of narratives in court (encoding) influences their emotional attunement to the stories at hand. First, we argue that the process of encoding is linked to the strict demand for dispassion in legal settings. Second, we introduce three techniques that regulate the emotional processes at play during the encoding of law narratives: demarcation, fragmentation, and proximation. Demarcation and fragmentation produce emotional distance from narratives and their associated emotions, while proximation refers to the deliberate calibration of emotional attunement to law stories to enable legal decision making. Demarcation and fragmentation are sustained by background emotions of ease and interest when stories align with legal requirements, versus disinterest and irritation when ‘too many’ details are introduced. Proximation is regulated through the epistemic emotions of doubt and certainty. By scrutinizing the subtle emotions involved in legal encoding, we problematize the ideal of judicial dispassion.