ABSTRACT
This introductory chapter locates legal anger in a wider contemporary and cultural context and outlines the conceptual and theoretical frameworks used in the book, mainly drawing on sociological theories but also philosophical, psychological, and historical understandings of anger. The chapter also contains a short brief section describing the different legal systems in the four countries on which the study is based: Italy, Sweden, the United States, and Scotland. It also provides the reader with a brief overview of the way anger has been examined within the field of law and emotions and contains a section describing the ethnographic methods that have been used to collect and analyse qualitative data on judges and prosecutors’ anger in their everyday work.
