ABSTRACT
This chapter, Respectable rage, revisits the question of what legal professionals get angry about by zooming in on moral anger. It shows moral anger to be a balancing act between different core ideals: ‘moral outrage’, which is used to signify the condemnation of offences, and ‘legal pathos’, which is used to signify anger as a manifestation of moral loyalty to a just process. By analysing instances of moral outrage and legal pathos, we show how these ideals are sometimes in conflict, sometimes intertwined. Legal pathos trumped moral outrage in all of the countries examined, but in countries with a common law tradition (the United States and Scotland), moral outrage is institutionalised into sentencing. The chapter shows that anger takes different routes towards retaliation, recognition, and resignation depending on the relative weight ascribed to outrage or pathos within the legal tradition and emotional regime in which it arises.
