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The Persistent Cultural Script Of Judicial Dispassion, Terry A. Maroney
The Persistent Cultural Script Of Judicial Dispassion, Terry A. Maroney
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
In contemporary Western jurisprudence it is never appropriate for emotion - anger, love, hatred, sadness, disgust, fear, joy - to affect judicial decision-making. A good judge should feel no emotion; if she does, she puts it aside. To call a judge emotional is a stinging insult, signifying a failure of discipline, impartiality, and reason. Insistence on judicial dispassion is a cultural script of unusual longevity and potency. But not only is the script wrong as a matter of human nature - emotion does not, in fact, invariably tend toward sloppiness, bias, and irrationality - but it is not quite so …
Emotional Regulation And Judicial Behavior, Terry A. Maroney
Emotional Regulation And Judicial Behavior, Terry A. Maroney
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
Judges are human and experience emotion when hearing cases, though the standard account of judging long has denied that fact. In the post-Realist era it is possible to acknowledge that judges have emotional reactions to their work, yet our legal culture continues to insist that a good judge firmly puts those reactions aside. Thus, we expect judges to regulate their emotions, either by preventing emotion’s emergence or by walling off its influence. But judges are given precisely no direction as to how to engage in emotional regulation.
This Article proposes a model for judicial emotion regulation that goes beyond a …