ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 scrutinizes the core of a legitimate rule of law and power usage: objectivity. The emotive-cognitive judicial frame holds positivist objectivity to be static, something one ‘is’. Furthermore, objectivity is assumed to be unemotional, because emotion, as opposed to instrumental pure reason, carries social bonds and affiliations, and morality (good and bad, likes and dislikes). We challenge this notion of objectivity by showing, first, that objectivity is profoundly emotional because the emotive-cognitive judicial frame sets its own moral standards and orients professionals by the pull of professional pride (doing good) and the push of professional shame, or shame-trigger warnings (doing bad). Second, we demonstrate the multiple ways that objectivity is done in situated processes of actions and interactions, involving emotion management, and how this situated doing of objectivity is distinctly different for judges and prosecutors. Judges primarily focus impartiality, while prosecutors primarily focus objectivity, enacted as a self-reflexive internal dialogue. In summary, while emotions can be rendered formally insignificant by the legal system, they will nonetheless be present. A lot of skilled emotion management goes into upholding the positivist ideal of unemotional objectivity itself.
