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The Discourse Beneath: Emotional Epistemology In Legal Deliberation And Negotiation, Erin Ryan

Erin Ryan

All lawyers negotiate, and all negotiators deliberate. This article addresses the pervasive but unrefined use of emotional insight by deliberating and negotiating lawyers, and suggests that legal education could improve lawyering by adopting a fuller model of legal thinking that takes account of this “epistemological emotionality.” In forming the beliefs that underlie choices made during deliberation and negotiation, people rely on insights informed by past and present emotional experience. Such epistemological emotional input fuels a pre-linguistic, quasi-inductive reasoning process that enables us to draw on stored information about emotional phenomena to hypothesize about motives, behavior, and potential consequences. As deliberation …