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Emotional Legal Arguments And A Broken Leg, Rubens Damasceno-Morais

OSSA Conference Archive

We intend to examine ways that emotions may be intertwined within argumentative legal discourses. From the transcript of a brief trial in a Court of Appeal in Brazil we have the opportunity to observe how the emotional and rational reasoning live together in a deliberation among magistrates. “The leg broken case” allow us to examine how judges define the value of compensation to be paid in cases of moral damage. We show that not only technical arguments are the compounds of one decision; subjectivity is also important in that legal context. We would yet confirm what jurists and …