ABSTRACT
The book's first empirical chapter, Nagging Narratives, explores what legal professionals get angry about in court, showing how anger is used to safeguard legal knowledge-seeking processes and assessments. Anger often strikes a balance between constraining stories to make them fit for legal evaluation and tolerating credible stories that tend to remain messy. In the complex cognitive work of translating experiences of crime into legally viable narratives, anger becomes a grid that can be used to detect discrepancies between the expected foundations for a legal decision and the actual evidence presented in a case, and as a tool to delineate legal relevance. Anger is also related to perceived inefficiency, manipulation, or unfairness and thus underscores values that are central to the legal process as such. In both instances, anger is used as capital to enforce complicity.
