Schultz on Acts of Truth: Emotions and the Validation of Legal Knowledge

Thomas Schultz, King's College London, University of Geneva, has published Acts of Truth: Emotions and the Validation of Legal Knowledge. Here is the abstract.

Legal scholarship presents itself as an exercise in reason: the scholar elucidates, weighs the sources, follows the argument, emotions left at the door. This Article argues that the pose is false, and consequentially so. Emotions shape not only the margins of scholarship-the topics we choose, the tone of our debates, the schools we form-but they also reach all the way into what we take to be legally valid and true. Building on Pierre Schlag's account of the aesthetics of law and on work in psychology and the philosophy of mind on the role of emotion in cognition, the Article reframes the validation of juristic truth as the product of two emotionally laden processes: epistemic decision-making, the "acts of truth" by which a proposition is accepted as valid, and epistemic negotiation, the agreements through which a community settles what counts as known. It then identifies emotions likely at work in each-beauty, the fear of death, the fear of exclusion, the needs for recognition and for toil; and, in negotiation, appreciation, affiliation, autonomy, status, and role-arguing that they carry ontological weight, helping to constitute law itself as an object of knowledge and argument. Why, then, do scholars so insistently deny them? The answer lies in a "normative alexithymia," a trained inability to read one's own emotions that leaves a community poorly equipped to see the lens through which it apprehends its object. The Article proceeds by suggestion rather than proof, aiming less to demonstrate these emotions than to make their workings visible. Its claim is that emotion has always accompanied reason in the making of legal knowledge-and that recognizing this is itself a condition of thinking well.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.