ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 presents an overview of the professional profiles of judges and prosecutors. These profiles are the outcome of judges’ and prosecutors’ different functions and work tasks in the legal system and of how they are selected for their respective careers. These partly shared profession-specific circumstances to generate emotive-cognitive dispositions and challenges. Uniting features are professional pride, a highly valued independence, and a sense of belonging to ‘a uniquely valuable group’, which means that prosecutors and judges are legal professionals on the ‘right side’ of justice. They thus share ‘group charisma’ although as distinct professional groups the group charisma is not equally distributed between them. Judges are closer to the ideal of pure objectivity and further removed from messy reality, while prosecutors perform the ‘dirty work’ of purifying and translating reality into legal codes. Judges’ professional pride revolves around autonomy and comfortable power. Prosecutors’ professional pride is centered on independence, which is ‘bounded’ in character yet capable of manifesting itself as independence based on power. Judges enjoy higher professional status than prosecutors do, but they also depend on the ‘dirty work’ performed by prosecutors. Different emotive-cognitive orientations thus result from these profession-specific circumstances.
