Journal Article

Seeking Emotional Ends with Legal Means

Abrams, Kathryn

2015

Overview

Can we use legal institutions to cultivate forgiveness after mass violence, genocide, or pervasive group-based injustice? This is the question Dean Minow asks in her provocative and pathbreaking Jorde Lecture. Yet she poses a question that is simpler and broader in its reach: Should we attempt use law in a purposive way to shape or foster human feeling? Both questions, as Minow acknowledges, evoke skepticism from those who see law as a of objectivity and reason, or those who view law as ineluctably and exclusively bound to norms such as consistency, predictability, and the resolution discrete controversies. However, as I argue in this Essay, these questions also elicit doubts from a less probable group of critics: scholars view law and emotions as deeply intertwined. Although on this group of critics, their concerns merit close attention; important set of questions facing this emerging field of and emotions scholars agree that we can use a rich, understanding of human emotions to assess, critique, or institutions. But there is more ambivalence about whether we can or should use the instrumentalities of the law to encourage or shape emotions in socially ameliorative ways. Although Minow's primary focus is on probing the instrumentalities of repair following mass violence, her essay provides a clear model of how we might pursue this second possibility as well, using the law's potential to support, foster, or cultivate pro-social emotions.

• Publisher: Sheridan Press,University of California - Berkeley, School of Law
• Subject: Critics / Emotions / Forgiveness / Genocide / Judicial power / Law / Legal institutions / Objectivity / Questions / Rule of law / The Brennan Center Jorde Symposium on Forgiveness, Law, and Justice