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• The discovering of emotions : – the Law and Emotion Scholarship in Legal Theory

  47-53.

  Zsófia Dóra Kovács

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  129

  The ’ideal judge’ does not know emotions. Sitting on the bench, the ideal judge is capable to exclude every emotion and making decisions completely objectively and rationally. In legal philosophy until the past few decades, the before mentioned ideal was prominent and still is to this day. However from the 60s in the Anglo-Saxon legal thinking, mainly in the United States of America, a change in perspective started to begin. There was a rapid development of movements that appraised the law and the phenomenons of law from an interdisciplinary point of view. The Critical Legal Studies movement became an independent direction within legal philosophy. Furthermore, there was great progress in the scientific study of emotions. In this area, both psychology and neurosciences achieved serious results. All of these elements together provided a base for the emergence and development of the Law and Emotion Scholarship. This emerging interdisciplinary field brings together scholars from law, psychology, classics, economics, literature and philosophy all of whom have a defining interest in law’s various relations to our emotions and emotional life. My research primarily focuses on the scholarship findings on judicial decision-making, studying how emotions can play a role in the judicial decision-making process. Because the scholars part of the Law and Emotion Scholarship – paying attention to the reality of the everyday life of judges – doubting the idea that emotionless judging is a genuine possibility.