ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 examines judges’ and prosecutors’ background emotions and emotion management from a power and status perspective. How do the dynamics of power and status in the courtroom influence emotions and emotion management strategies? How do judges and prosecutors deal with power in their work roles? How do professional power and status shape judges’ and prosecutors’ interactions with other professionals and with lay people? Increasing workloads require faster decisions from both judges and prosecutors, which, as combined with the serious consequences of their decisions, put great pressure on their capacity to confidently perform autonomy and independence. We examine the background emotions conducive or disruptive of the use of power, and the emotional outcomes of power and status challenges, and related emotion management strategies. While judges are required to habituate a feeling of comfort with being in power as part of their autonomous emotional profile, prosecutors’ power is circumscribed by their ‘bounded independence’, orienting them to mitigate power with status (‘being liked’). However, the essence of prosecutors’ independence is seen when they sometimes use power in spite of losing status. In all these different dimensions, the legitimacy of the rule of law is key to a confident use of power.
