LFC Seminar Series: Judicial Work and Emotion Work: Findings from Empirical Research

LFC Seminar Series: Judicial Work and Emotion Work: Findings from Empirical Research
LFC Seminar Series: Judicial Work and Emotion Work: Findings from Empirical Research

Principal speaker

Professor Sharyn Roach Anleu

Abstract

Judicial work, as conventionally understood, is to be undertaken with impersonal detachment and without emotion. Emotion is assumed to be fundamentally inconsistent with impartial and rational judicial authority. The individual judge is constructed as the embodiment of this emotionless, impersonal rational law. However, extensive empirical research on judicial officers and their courts demonstrates that everyday judicial work, especially in lower courts, can be emotionally dense and can entail considerable emotion work. This roundtable examines the practices judicial officers adopt to manage their own emotions and those of court users, within the institutional and organisational constraints of courts and judicial work. Through these everyday strategies, judicial officers articulate, reproduce and potentially transform the boundaries between the emotions they experience and/or display and the explicit and implicit norms of emotion and judging. These findings reposition emotion work as central to judicial performance and enable emotion to be recognised as a positive judicial resource.

About the speaker

Sharyn Roach Anleu is a Matthew Flinders Distinguished Professor of Sociology in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Flinders University, Adelaide and Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences. She is a past president of The Australian Sociological Association and the author of Law and Social Change and four editions of Deviance, Conformity and Control. She has contributed to the Masters Program at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law, Oñati, Spain. With Emerita Professor Kathy Mack, Flinders University, she leads the Judicial Research Project which undertakes socio-legal research into the Australian judiciary and its courts. Their latest book is Performing Judicial Authority in the Lower Courts (2017, Palgrave), and in 2018 Sharyn and Jessica Milner Davis co-edited Judges, Judging and Humour (Palgrave).

About the seminar

Professor Sharyn Roach Anleu will present her Law Futures Seminar at the Griffith Law School (N61) Nathan campus with a videolink to the Griffith Law School (G36) Gold Coast campus. When registering for this seminar, please indicate in your email which campus you will attend.


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RSVP

RSVP on or before Tuesday 30 July 2019 , by email lawfutures@griffith.edu.au

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Session 1


Session 2