INTRODUCTION

In the modern political context, populism is often described as a deeply emotional rhetoric connected with dissatisfaction with liberal constitutionalism due to its distance from the lives of ‘ordinary people’ and serving the interests of a narrow class. This fuels the drive for a radical change in the political realm and legal policies. Populism seems to entail strong collective emotions, often leading to destructive aspirations, especially with regards to the concept of rule of law and observance of the constitution. While the emotional mechanisms of populism are often the subject of analysis for social scientists, and the mechanism in which populism affects law becomes the concern of jurisprudence, studies connecting the threads are lacking. The triangular relation between populism, affect, and law is a curious ground for further exploration, which might produce new insights along each of these lines.

The goal of this chapter is to sketch out the connection between populism, emotions and the law in order to show how tools and insights offered by Law and Emotions scholarship (hereafter referred to as L&E) can be applied in the studies of contemporary populism. In other words, I ask: what does L&E bring to the table for populism studies? The chapter looks into the points of connection between populism and law and juxtaposes them with the achievements of the L&E movement. Law and legality is undoubtedly one of the lines by which the populist policies might be analysed. Populism may even be defined by its relationship to policies and to foundational legal acts. But without also problematising it in terms of the affect, the links between populism and law may be still too opaque to take account of the phenomenon properly.

The populism I will refer to throughout this work is not to be modelled after any special country, but rather, is to be understood as an egregore of features that characterise this concept, especially in its authoritarian, anti-constitution variety. This kind of populism manifests, inter alia, in envisioning constitutional law as protecting elite as opposed to mass interests, which in turn legitimises attacking it. It is also characterised by its scepticism towards conceptions of legality and rule of law, as well as constitution law and institutions in their current form.