Emotion and the Law

Akron law review, 2021

Emotions constitute an integral part of the diverse approaches that we bring to bear upon our most pressing law and policy issues. This article explores the role of emotions in intellectual property, information, and technology law (IP). Like other areas of law, IP commits to, prioritizes, and even honors, reason, logic, and factswhich can result in the sidelining of the affective components of law. Yet our affective responses to legal and other phenomena influence both cognition and reason. Part I of the article provides a general overview of the field of law and emotions, pointing out how this approach to understanding law already exists, albeit still mostly

Emotion in Human-Computer Interaction Emotion is a fundamental component of being human. Joy, hate, anger, and pride, among the plethora of other emotions, motivate action and add meaning and richness to virtually all human experience. Traditionally, human-computer interaction has been viewed as the “ultimate” exception: Users must discard their emotional selves to work efficiently and rationality with computers, the quintessentially unemotional artifact.

It is argued that emotions are lawful phenomena and thus can be described in terms of a set of laws of emotion. These laws result from the operation of emotion mechanisms that are accessible to intentional control to only a limited extent. The law of situational meaning, the law of concern, the law of reality, the laws of change, habituation and comparative feeling, and the law of hedonic asymmetry are proposed to describe emotion elicitation; the law of conservation of emotional momentum formulates emotion persistence," the law of closure expresses the modularity of emotion; and the laws of care for consequence, of lightest load, and of greatest gain pertain to emotion regulation.

2016

The emerging interdisciplinary field of “Law and Emotions” brings together scholars from law, psychology, classics, economics, literature and philosophy all of whom have a defining interest in law’s various relations to our emotions and to emotional life: they share a passion for law’s passions. They also share the critical premise, or assumption, that most legal scholars of at least the last half century, with a few exceptions, have mistakenly accorded too great of a role to reason, rationality, and the cool calculations of self interest, and have accorded too small a role to emotion, to the creation, the imagining, the generation, the interpretation, and the reception of law. Their scholarship is in part offered as a collective corrective to what they perceive as the legal academy’s dominant and ill-conceived bias toward reason and rationalism, when explaining legal phenomena. In my comments this morning, however, I want to pose a question that I believe has been neglected by law ...

Emotion Review, 2015

Law and emotion has evolved into a vibrant and diverse field, drawing in legal scholars and interdisciplinary partners from across the social sciences, hard sciences, and humanities. This introduction to the special section on law and emotion traces the history and theoretical underpinnings of this movement and situates the special section within it. The insights of emotion research can help legal scholars and practitioners to better calibrate law to human realities and to foster a desired set of emotional experiences among law’s subjects. Law, in turn, offers to researchers a forum within which to explore emotion in a dynamic and influential real-world setting. The introduction ends with a call to disciplined interdisciplinarity.

SSRN Electronic Journal

Philosophical Psychology, 2020

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American Psychologist, 43(5), 349–358, 1988

It is argued that emotions are lawful phenomena and thus can be described in terms of a set of laws of emotion. These laws result from the operation of emotion mechanisms that are accessible to intentional control to only a limited extent. The law of situational meaning, the law of concern, the law of reality, the laws of change, habituation and comparative feeling, and the law of hedonic asymmetry are proposed to describe emotion elicitation; the law of conservation of emotional momentum formulates emotion persistence," the law of closure expresses the modularity of emotion; and the laws of care for consequence, of lightest load, and of greatest gain pertain to emotion regulation.

Law, Reason, and Emotion

The emerging interdisciplinary field of "Law and Emotions" brings together scholars from law, psychology, classics, economics, literature and philosophy all of whom have a defining interest in law's various relations to our emotions and to emotional life: they share a passion for law's passions. 1 They also share the critical premise, or assumption, that most legal scholars of at least the last half century, with a few exceptions, have mistakenly accorded too great of a role to reason, rationality, and the cool calculations of self interest, and have accorded too small a role to emotion, to the creation, the imagining, the generation, the interpretation, and the reception of law. 2 Their scholarship is in part offered as a collective corrective to what they perceive as the legal academy's dominant and ill-conceived bias toward reason and rationalism, when explaining legal phenomena. At least sometimes and to some degree, and sometimes for better while often for worse, according to this body of scholarship, all sorts of legal actors-legislators, judges, jurors, litigants, private contractors, city council members, drafters of constitutions, the authors of universal declarations of rights, and of course lawyers and legal scholars as well-are moved toward our legalistic decisions or our artful legal arguments by the force of our passions, rather than by the moral force of either shared or neutral principles, deductions from the natural law, inferences from past precedent, or a toting of societal costs and benefits. 3

2014