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Regarding Pained Sympathy And Sympathy Pains: Morality, And Empathy In The Civil Adjudication Of Pain, Jody L. Madeira
Regarding Pained Sympathy And Sympathy Pains: Morality, And Empathy In The Civil Adjudication Of Pain, Jody L. Madeira
Articles by Maurer Faculty
This Essay considers the legal propriety of the empathic responses of jurors to suffering plaintiffs. To that end, Part II first explicates the legal contours of a tension between what is experiential or physical (objective) and what is expressionistic or non-physical (subjective). This tension is a foundational jurisprudential concern in personal injury litigation because the subjective is seen to threaten the rule of law: the perceived primacy of reason and logic. Thus, this tension is also what the parties' attorneys seek to exploit and what the court seeks to constrain. Part III explores why an empathic identification is indeed a …
Recognizing Odysseus' Scar: Reconceptualizing Pain And Its Empathic Role In Civil Adjudication, Jody L. Madeira
Recognizing Odysseus' Scar: Reconceptualizing Pain And Its Empathic Role In Civil Adjudication, Jody L. Madeira
Articles by Maurer Faculty
This Article proffers a consideration of how the expression of pain impacts the interpersonal dimensions of personal injury proceedings, contesting through philosophical logic and textual analyses of case law and legal practitioners' texts the conclusion of scholars such as Elaine Scarry and Robert Cover that pain unmakes both the word and the world. Seeing pain as something that can and must be communicated, albeit in a different form than pain embodied, makes pain a much more profound force, comports with our understanding of pain as a physical yet interpersonally meaningful sensation, and has many evidentiary ramifications. Taking as its premise …