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Emotion and Law: How Pre-Rational Cognition Influences Judgment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2019

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This short essay seeks to introduce the phenomenological approach to law and legal decision-making, and to show the role of emotion in guiding the person applying the law. The peculiarity of the phenomenological approach-which substantially refers to the principles of Kantian epistemology-is found in the philosophical analysis of perception: Perception itself contains a specific emotional competence for evaluation, which will be disclosed to the legal context. In this context, phenomena, i.e., the contents that we perceive through our acts of perception, will be exposed as a basis for ethical decisions. Typically, when questions of legal interpretation call forth conflicts between core ethical values, it appears that the competence of a primary, intuitive judgment strongly forms our decision-making process. The phenomenological approach will thus point out the openness of a legal system towards criteria of extra-legal value judgment. Furthermore, this approach will reveal legal practitioners’ emotional competences for judgment as a source of normativity. An emotional ability to judge will finally be-in a series of examples-referred to as the last instance on our quest for justice.

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Copyright © 2012 by German Law Journal GbR 

References

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