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The Role And Reality Of Emotions In Law, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

It is a great pleasure to participate in the celebration and exploration of Susan Bandes' The Passions of Law in this symposium on emotion and gender jurisprudence. It may be worth reminding today's law students that when Professor Bandes and I were classmates at the University of Michigan Law School in the mid-1970s, there were no such conferences. Jurisprudence existed, but the concept of gender had not yet emerged; we were still too busy defining feminism. Emotions were something we dutifully suppressed as we tried to assimilate into the legal profession.

This is not to say we were wholly unaffected …