Abstract
Legal reasoning in the common law tradition requires judges to draw on concepts, and examples that are meant to resonate with a particular emotional import and operate in judicial reasoning as though they do. Judicial applications of constitutional rights are regularly interpreted by reference to past violations (either through precedent, contextual framings, and/or legislative history), which in turn elicit a series of emotions which work to deepen and intensify judicial understandings of a right guarantee (freedom of association, freedom of expression, equality, security of the person, etc.). This paper examines the way in which invocations of past political histories, and rights abuses (however ill or well-defined), work to conjure up a set of service emotions (emotions which work to establish a particular frame of mind), which guide judicial applications of doctrine in cases concerning an alleged violation of a constitutional right. El razonamiento jurídico en la tradición de derecho consuetudinario exige que los jueces partan de conceptos y de ejemplos que se supone se hacen eco de un significado emocional concreto y que, en el razonamiento judicial, operan como si de hecho así fuera. La aplicación judicial de derechos constitucionales se interpreta generalmente por medio de referencias a delitos anteriores (a través de encuadres contextuales precedentes o bien a través de la historia legislativa), lo que, a su vez, invoca una serie de emociones que profundizan e intensifican la interpretación judicial de una garantía jurídica (libertad de asociación, libertad de expresión, igualdad, seguridad de la persona, etc.). Este artículo analiza la forma en que las invocaciones a la historia política o a abusos de derechos (por mal o bien definidos que estén) sirven para formar un conjunto de emociones de servicio (que sirven para establecer un estado de ánimo concreto), que guían la aplicación judicial de la doctrina en casos de presuntas violaciones de derechos constitucionales.
Highlights
Judges have distinct role-related reasons for conscientiously drawing on certain emotions, or even cultivating certain affective dispositions which flow both from the governing legal doctrine (Bandes 1996, 1999, Gardner 2008, White 2014), and more generally, from the serious and solemn task of judicial reasoning, and judicial decision-making
The adjudication of constitutional rights requires judges to consciously draw on a series of affectively charged examples drawn from precedent or legislative history, which cultivate a series of solemn emotions like lament, rue, and indignation
This paper set as its task an examination of the way in which a set of service emotions proves integral to judicial reasoning in the context of an alleged violation of a constitutional right
Summary
While the ideal of the dispassionate judge reflects an important set of normative commitments that track widely across differing approaches to the study of law, it rests upon an account of law and the judicial role that remains only surface-level true. The emotions required by legal reasoning might at times overlap, make good on (law might make certain emotions, or more broadly, certain ethical activity possible), or echo real normative commitments, but this question of convergence is always separate and distinct As it will be argued, it is especially important to keep the question alive, given that the service emotions that play constitutive roles in legal reasoning claim the status and authority of moral emotions (and reasons; see Raz 1979) as they work to establish emotionally-laden ways of seeing and reasoning about legal objects, subjects, actions, and events. The paper draws on the tools of analytical philosophy to work out the emotional elements of certain practices of legal reasoning, and, as such, is distinct from an inquiry into our ability to access the sincere-or-not mental states of judges, and so too, sociological research on the expressive or performative aspects of judicial behavior (see Roach Anleu and Mack 2017, Bergman Blix and Wettergren 2018).
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