Faces of Judicial Anger: Answering the Call

Abstract:     
Law and justice have a complicated and paradoxical relationship to anger. On the one hand, law seeks to suppress anger, and on the other hand, tries to channel it. In this paper, we interrogate the practices of judgment whereby wrath is (and is not) made judicially manifest. We begin with some comments on the tools available for uncovering the presence of judicial emotion, and the kinds of questions that can inform an inquiry into judicial anger. Our goal is to sketch out the beginnings of a method for making visible that anger. We follow that discussion with a performance of the method we propose, interrogating the four opinions generated by the five Canadian Supreme Court justices who sat in judgement in R. v. F.F.B.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 42

Keywords: law, emotion, wrath, vengence, virtue, vice, witnesses, justice, judges, public/private, judicial opinions, judicial biography, text, rhetoric, conventions of legal writing, public law, private law, dissent, concurrence, narrative, sexual assault, trauma, evidence, R v. F.F.B.

Accepted Paper Series