Cotterrell on Law, Emotion, and Affective Community @QMSchoolofLaw

Roger Cotterrell, Queen Mary School of Law, has published Law, Emotion and Affective Community. Here is the abstract.

How should socio-legal theory conceptualise ‘emotion’ as an aspect of social relations that law addresses? This paper uses a concept of affective community – communal social relations dominated by emotional elements – to analyse basic problems for legal regulation that are typical in social relations founded on emotion. What regulatory challenges does affective community pose that may be unique to it, and how does affective community itself produce, shape or constrain regulation? If relations of community presume a degree of stability (continuity and mutual trust), what, in general, promotes such stability in affective relations and what threatens it? What contribution, if any, can state law make to create or maintain such stable conditions? What general problems exist for state law in intervening in affective community? What kinds of demands can properly be made on law in this area? By developing the idea of affective community and exploring its regulatory implications, this paper sketches a theoretical framework by means of which fundamental questions about relations of law and emotion can be structured.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.