In the Chair: Sheriff Tom Welsh, QC

Judges and prosecutors have to be objective and impartial in their decision-making. Seen from a traditional view, objectivity secures ruling based on facts and logic and legal decision-making has long been seen as a process building on pure reason - just decisions presumably involves putting emotions aside.

Yet recent studies have shown the importance of emotions for rational decision-making. Subtle emotional processes, such as interest in gaining information, pride in a professional performance, and distaste for negligence, orient rational action by underpinning and directing cognitive abilities. This means that to understand legal decision-making in actual practice, it is also important to scrutinize the concepts of objectivity and impartiality through an emotion lens.

In addition, justice also have to be “seen to be done”; judges need to display an impartial demeanour, and in some regards prosecutors need to demonstrate objectivity in spite of being party in court. This demands understanding, emotional attuning, and empathy as well as effective communication.

Associate Professor Stina Bergman Blix has been studying professional emotions in and of the work of judges and prosecutors in Sweden for the last eight years. She will outline her findings about how prosecutors and judges manage emotions in court from a general perspective and then present some preliminary findings on the role of emotion in judicial decision-making. In the end, she will discuss the implications for academic and public understanding.

Professor Stina Bergman Blix (Uppsala University) specialises in how people work with emotions in professional settings. She is co-author of Professional Emotions in Court: A Sociological Perspective, which will be published in late 2018. Her previous book Rehearsing Emotions: The Process of Creating a Role for the Stage (2015) discusses her earlier research into how theatre actors inhabit their role.