ABSTRACT
The chapter examines the relationships between law and emotions. The judicial scene is largely described and analyzed through discursive exchanges and this offers a fine understanding of judicial courses of action. However, few works studied the judicial scene as the locus of multimodal exchanges mixing language, glances, intonations, postures and gestures. When becoming sensitive to the non-verbal language that completes and indexes discourse, scholars can take the emotional dimension of judicial action into account. While ubiquitous in audiences, emotions are not considered as a relevant object to study practical legal reasoning, since they do neither belong to prescribed factual categories nor to the authoritative legal documents. Unless it is constituted as a topic for discussion (remorse, regrets, suffering), emotions are not welcome at the bar. The judicial ritual does not tolerate expression of anger or sorrow. Speech is framed and largely delegated to law professionals who are supposed to adopt a measured posture, while the audience is deemed to proceed without hitches. Surreptitiously, however, emotional expressions offer precious landmarks to law professionals, especially judges, who extract from them indications as to the veracity of alleged facts, the relevance of pleaded arguments, or the authenticity of the formulated request. Emotions become thus an integral part of the modalities of judicial reasoning. It supposes that judges proceed against the background of shared cultural knowledge, that is, a set of notions, codes, knowledges, standards and tags within which an ordinary member of society moves in a way that is both competent and unproblematic. After having paved the ground of an anthropological analysis of emotions, the chapter proposes, on the basis of an ethnography conducted in a Belgian court in charge of family disputes, a study of the place of emotions in judicial interaction and in monocultural decision making, which will then be put into perspective with intercultural situations.
