ABSTRACT
Anger is often depicted as brief, explosive, and intense, and this chapter, Timely temper, problematises this understanding by analysing legal anger from a temporal perspective. By tracing how anger is intertwined with the interaction order of the courtroom, it shows how legal anger builds over time, interacts with other emotions, and comes in different degrees of intensity and duration. Anger surfaces in brief and intense outbursts, simmers as a low-key energiser, or is performed to indicate status. In this way, when employed by high-status professionals, anger is adapted both temporally and spatially to legal tasks and ideals. When tempered in this timely fashion, legal anger becomes a rational means of performing both adaptability and determination when facing everyday challenges in legal work.
