Abstract
The legal emotions history is a theoretically and methodologically pluralistic field that brings into dialogue scholarship by legal scholars on ‘law and emotions’ and scholarly work by historians on the ‘history of emotions’. It subjects historical legal records to jurisprudential and historiographical critique to explore how emotions shaped legal relations and how law and its institutions sought to control, regulate or foster certain emotions. By centring emotions in legal history, the field undermines assumptions about the timelessness or spontaneity of emotions and destabilises positivist perceptions of modern law as the ‘perfection of reason’. Beginning with an overview of trends in both legal and historical approaches to the topic, this chapter offers a taxonomy of future research directions and concludes with a call to decolonise the legal emotions history by moving beyond western legal archives to engage with a plurality of legal languages and epistemologies.
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