Judging and Emotion - Dr Sharyn Roach Anleu, Flinders University

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Speaker: Sharyn Roach Anleu, Flinders University

The conventional model of judging disavows emotion and valorises impersonal detachment.  Emotion is assumed to be political, unstable, personal and irrational, the antithesis of the impartial exercise of judicial authority.  Discussions of judging and judicial work often frame the individual judge as the embodiment of emotionless, impersonal rational law.

Yet everyday judicial work, especially in lower courts, can be emotionally dense and accomplishing an emotionless demeanour can entail considerable emotion work.

Drawing on empirical research in Australia’s courts, this lecture examines the practices or strategies judicial officers adopt to manage their own emotions and those of court users, within the institutional and organisational constraints of judicial work.  Judicial officers articulate, reproduce and potentially transform the boundaries between the emotions they experience and/or display and their status as judge. These findings reposition emotion work as central to judicial performance and enable emotion to be recognised as a positive judicial resource.

Sharyn Roach Anleu is Matthew Flinders Distinguished Professor in Sociology at Flinders University, Adelaide. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, as a former President of The Australian Sociological Association and a former member of the Australian Research Council College of Experts. Her research spans gender and the legal profession, regulation, law and social change and guilty pleas. She is currently Chief Investigator of the Judicial Research Project, with Emerita Professor Kathy Mack, a multi-year, multi-method study of courts and judicial officers throughout Australia funded by the Australian Research Council (www.flinders.edu.au/law/judicialresearch/)

• Welcome Reception - 17.15pm
• Public Lecture - 18.00pm
• Close of Public Lecture - 19.30pm