Making Independent Decisions Together: Rational Emotions in Legal Adjudication

Blix, Stina Bergman

doi:10.1002/symb.549

Cited by 6 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 59 publications

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“…However, if the ceremonial aspects of the courtroom activities appear to be the hearing's most important functions, the legitimacy of courts as institutions of justice would be lost (Komter, 1998). Therefore, judicial decisionmaking needs to appear to be spontaneous, without predetermined outcomes, and judges need to show that they have weighed different rules, arguments, and facts against each other before reaching a final decision (Bergman Blix, 2022;Bouillier, 2015).…”

Section: Communicating Authority and Unity To Participants Of The Tri...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Symbolic Life of Courts: How Judicial Language, Actions, and Objects Legitimize Credibility Assessments of Asylum Appeals

Johannesson

2022

Int. Migration & Integration

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Asylum determinations are highly complex and difficult decisions. At the heart of this decision lies a credibility assessment of the asylum claimant’s narrative, which confronts the decision-maker with a seemingly straightforward question: do I believe this person’s story? To uphold legitimacy of this assessment, semi-legal criteria have been established internationally. However, these criteria have been criticized for relying on inaccurate and simplistic assumptions about human behavior, autobiographical memory, and communication. In light of this contestation, I ask how the legal-administrative practice of assessing credibility of asylum applications gains legitimacy in the eyes of the public, policy-makers, and legal professionals despite resting on highly disputable assumptions? To answer this question, I draw on interviews, observations, and written judgements from the Swedish administrative courts to explore how symbolic messages are tacitly conveyed through the use of judicial language, activities, and objects. The analysis suggests that cohesive, albeit tacit, messages about credibility assessments being accurate (rather than arbitrary), objective (rather than subjective), professional (rather than lay), and just (rather than unjust) are produced to both near and distant audiences. The study contributes to the literature on credibility assessments by offering a theoretical perspective that can unpack the relationship between symbolic communication in courts and perceived legitimacy for disputed practices within asylum determinations and migration control.

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Section: Communicating Authority and Unity To Participants Of The Tri...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Symbolic Life of Courts: How Judicial Language, Actions, and Objects Legitimize Credibility Assessments of Asylum Appeals

Johannesson

2022

Int. Migration & Integration

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“…Our theoretical framework builds on the sociology of emotions, in particular from Arlie Hochschild (for example 1983) and Jack Barbalet (for example 1998). In previous work, we have developed and adapted these perspectives to an emotion-sociological framework for analyzing emotions in the legal field (Bergman Blix and Wettergren 2016, 2018; Wettergren 2019; Bergman Blix 2021). Given that our purpose in this article is to analyze key dimensions of habituating prosecutorial emotions, we focus this theoretical section on explaining our overarching theoretical construct, the emotive-cognitive judicial frame , and some of the empirically grounded concepts used in our analysis.…”

Section: An Emotion-sociological Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prosecutors’ Habituation of Emotion Management in Swedish Courts

Wettergren¹,

Blix²

2021

Law Soc. Inq.

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The article examines the professional emotion management underlying prosecutors’ work in court. Building on interviews and observations of forty-one prosecutors at five offices in Sweden, and drawing on sociological theories of emotion habituation, we analyze the emotion management necessary to perform frontstage (in court) professionalism as a prosecutor. We divide our analysis into three key dimensions of habituation: the feeling rules of confidence and mastering anxiety associated with an independent performance; the feeling rules of emotional distance and a balanced display associated with performing the objective party; and the playful and strategic improvisation of feeling rules associated with relaxed emotional presence. The routinization of feeling rules and the gradual backgrounding of related emotion management leads to habituation. Our findings enhance understanding of emotion management skills as part of tacit knowledge conveyed in the legal professions where emotion-talk and emotional reflexivity are little acknowledged. The article also contributes to the largely US-dominated previous research by adding a civil law perspective on prosecutorial emotion management.

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Therapeutic States to Face Instability and Uncertain Societies

Palavicini Corona

2024

Society and New Paradigms

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Making Independent Decisions Together: Rational Emotions in Legal Adjudication

Cited by 6 publications

References 59 publications

The Symbolic Life of Courts: How Judicial Language, Actions, and Objects Legitimize Credibility Assessments of Asylum Appeals

The Symbolic Life of Courts: How Judicial Language, Actions, and Objects Legitimize Credibility Assessments of Asylum Appeals

Prosecutors’ Habituation of Emotion Management in Swedish Courts

Therapeutic States to Face Instability and Uncertain Societies

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