By Anubhuti Raje*
I. INTRODUCTION
In the architecture of justice, reason is often cast as marble–cold, stable, and immune to the tremors of human feeling. Legal education trains us to “think like lawyers”, to analyze without sentiment, and argue without emotion. The law, we are told, must be rational to be fair. Yet beneath the austere geometry of legal logic lies an invisible foundation: emotion. We are moved by outrage at injustice, empathy for victims, or the quiet satisfaction of fairness restored. These are not peripheral sensations but the moral pulse of the legal system itself.
Paradoxically, it is the law’s pursuit of pure objectivity that often makes it less just. The suppression of emotion in legal reasoning has created a system that prizes technical correctness over moral coherence. The result is what the philosopher Martha Nussbaum calls “moral blindness”, a failure to see what truly matters because one refuses to feel it.[i]Counterintuitively, then, reclaiming emotion within law is not a descent into irrationality; it is a return to our deepest capacity for reasoned humanity.
This essay argues that emotion is not the enemy of justice but its architecture, the framework that gives law its legitimacy, empathy, and meaning. By tracing how law came to suppress emotion, examining the ways emotion shapes fairness and moral reasoning, and proposing pathways to rehumanize legal practice, it contends that a jurisprudence of feeling is essential to the future of justice.
While this essay centres the courtroom as a site of emotional negotiation, it also adopts a broader perspective. Justice here includes not only the adjudication of disputes but the pedagogical and institutional processes that produce legal actors. The argument therefore, concerns the emotional foundations of fairness, both as a legal outcome and as a lived experience of the legal system.
II. THE MYTH OF OBJECTIVITY: HOW LAW LEARNED TO SUPPRESS FEELING
The law’s mistrust of emotion is neither accidental nor recent. It is the product of centuries of philosophical inheritance, institutional conditioning, and professional identity built on detachment.
A. The Rationalist Legacy
Modern law was born in the Enlightenment’s shadow, an era that elevated reason as humanity’s crowning virtue. René Descartes’ proclamation, “I think, therefore I am”, made intellect the essence of existence, while emotion was relegated to the body: volatile, feminine, and suspect. Legal systems built in this image sought to exclude feeling as an obstacle to impartiality. Judges were trained to suppress empathy, advocates to subordinate emotion to argument. The rational mind, purified of sentiment, became the legal ideal.
This aspiration toward impersonal governance was not neutral; it mirrored prevailing hierarchies of power. Colonial legal systems, for instance, justified their authority by characterizing Indigenous legal traditions as irrational or overly emotional.[ii] Similarly, the association of emotion with femininity reinforced a masculine ideal of judicial detachment, positioning reason not just as superior but as inherently gendered.[iii] The dismissal of emotion thus became a means of legitimizing who is permitted to exercise legal authority.
This rationalist legacy found institutional expression in the pedagogy of the common law. From the first year of law school, students are taught to strip narratives of their emotional resonance, to see facts as “material” or “irrelevant”. The case method, lauded for its analytical rigor, also conditions emotional detachment. To “think like a lawyer” is, in effect, to unlearn the moral reflexes of ordinary life. As psychologist Susan Bandes observes, legal conventions in criminal lawyering has cultivated a deliberately narrow ideal of emotional intelligence that rewards the performance of neutrality while the discipline itself overlooks the morally relevant knowledge that feelings disclose.[iv]
B. The Cost of Emotional Erasure
The irony is that emotion, not logic, often grounds moral discernment. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s groundbreaking work demonstrates that individuals who lose emotional capacity due to brain injury also lose the ability to make sound decisions.[v] Emotion, in other words, is not an intruder in reason but its catalyst.
Yet the legal system’s insistence on detachment exacts a profound cost. It alienates lawyers from their moral intuitions and from their clients’ humanity. The culture of emotional suppression contributes to burnout, compassion fatigue, and depression at rates higher than in nearly any other profession.[vi] It also distorts judgment: when empathy is disallowed, cruelty can masquerade as neutrality. As Nussbaum argues in her study of public reasoning, a legal order that disowns emotion may still become ethically unbalanced, because detachment can slide into indifference toward dignity and toward the experience of suffering.[vii]
Thus, what began as an intellectual discipline has hardened into a psychological constraint. The myth of objectivity has not made law more just; it has made justice less human.
III. FEELING AS EVIDENCE: THE PLACE OF EMOTION IN JUSTICE
If emotion has long been exiled from the courtroom, its return is now underway. Recent decades have witnessed a quiet revolution in the philosophy of law, psychology, and neuroscience: the recognition that emotion is indispensable to fairness, empathy, and legitimacy.
A. Emotion Enhances Moral Reasoning
Contrary to the traditional dichotomy, emotion does not cloud moral judgment, it refines it. Compassion, anger, and guilt, when properly regulated, function as moral perceptions. They alert us to harm, injustice, and moral salience that purely cognitive reasoning may overlook. Damasio’s “somatic-marker hypothesis” demonstrates that emotional cues enable individuals to navigate complex moral decisions that reason alone cannot resolve.[viii]
Legal philosophers have echoed this insight. Nussbaum argues that emotions are “intelligent responses to the perception of value,” integral to ethical judgment and civic life.[ix] Likewise, feminist legal theorists have long insisted that empathy is not a bias but a virtue, a bridge between abstract rule and lived experience. Without it, the law risks degenerating into what Catharine MacKinnon called “a system of male reason pretending to be universal.”[x]
Indeed, the Canadian Supreme Court’s own jurisprudence has occasionally recognized the moral function of emotion. In R v Lavallee, the acknowledgment of “battered woman syndrome” as a legitimate lens for self-defence marked an institutional willingness to let empathy inform justice.[xi] Such moments demonstrate that when courts make room for emotion, they do not compromise objectivity, they deepen it.
Outside criminal law, similar dynamics emerge in administrative and human rights litigation.[xii] For example, tribunals assessing discrimination or harassment routinely evaluate the emotional impact of conduct to determine whether a reasonable person would feel demeaned or unsafe.[xiii] In these contexts, emotion does not undermine legal reasoning; it constitutes the very harm that law must recognize.
B. Emotion Promotes Procedural Fairness
Justice is not merely the correct application of rules; it is the experience of being heard, respected, and understood. Studies in “therapeutic jurisprudence” reveal that litigants who perceive judges as compassionate are more likely to accept even adverse outcomes.[xiv] Emotion, then, is a form of procedural fairness, a signal that the system recognizes the individual as a person rather than a case file.
In this light, empathy becomes an institutional virtue. Courtrooms designed to acknowledge emotion foster trust and compliance; those that suppress it breed alienation. As psychologist Tom Tyler demonstrates through his theory of procedural justice, the perception that courts treat individuals with respect and grant them voice in the process encourages obedience and trust as strongly as, and often more durably than, the distributive result of the judgment.[xv]
Consequently, to feel is not to falter; it is to humanize the law’s machinery. Emotional awareness among judges, lawyers, and jurors does not distort justice, it makes justice perceptible.
Emotion also has an inward dimension that shapes the very practice of justice. Judges, lawyers, and students do not merely encounter emotion in others; they interpret legal situations through their own emotional lives. Neuroscientific research shows that emotional regulation and self-awareness support more accurate decision-making, while suppression impairs judgment under pressure. Cultivating reflective and compassionate engagement with one’s own emotional responses, therefore, becomes not a therapeutic indulgence but a condition for ethical legal reasoning. Justice requires empathy for others, but it also requires a humane relationship to oneself.
IV. REHUMANIZING THE LAW: TOWARDS AN EMOTIONAL JURISPRUDENCE
Recognizing the role of emotion in justice is only the first step. The greater challenge is to build institutions and practices that integrate emotion as a legitimate source of insight rather than a threat to rationality.
At the institutional level, law schools and firms must reimagine the skills that define professional competence. Courses in emotional intelligence, mindfulness, and trauma-informed advocacy should stand alongside courses in constitutional law and contracts. The ability to empathize, to listen actively, and to manage one’s own emotional responses are not ancillary talents; they are professional obligations. As Lawrence Krieger and Kennon Sheldon found, lawyers’ happiness correlates far more strongly with intrinsic values such as connection and compassion than with external measures like income or prestige.[xvi]
Firms and organizations, too, must confront the emotional austerity of legal culture. Billable-hour models that commodify time at the expense of well-being erode both judgment and humanity.[xvii] Counterintuitively, introducing flexibility, mentorship, and empathetic leadership does not dilute professional excellence; it sustains it. In this respect, emotion is not a distraction from productivity but its foundation.
Procedurally, an emotional jurisprudence requires that legal processes account for trauma and vulnerability. Trauma-informed adjudication recognizes that memory, demeanour, and communication are shaped by psychological harm.[xviii] Courts in several jurisdictions have increasingly adopted trauma-informed and culturally contextual approaches, cautioning that survivor testimony and indigenous narratives must not be judged by stereotypical expectations of emotional stoicism or by a rigid demand for linear coherence.[xix] Likewise, restorative justice and therapeutic jurisprudence models emphasize dignity, participation, and emotional safety as prerequisites for meaningful legal outcomes. Here, emotion is not a threat to neutrality but a condition for access to justice.
At the individual level, lawyers and law students must undertake the quieter, more personal work of emotional awareness. To feel deeply in the face of suffering, injustice, or even failure is not weakness; it is moral participation in the life of the law. The cultivation of empathy allows advocates to represent clients more authentically and to see beyond the sterile categories of “plaintiff” and “defendant.” Of course, emotion is not normatively pure. Sympathy can be unevenly distributed and may favour litigants who conform to dominant narratives of vulnerability, while anger can be weaponized to justify punitive excess. These risks, however, do not support the exclusion of emotion. They instead underscore the need for emotional literacy and regulation as professional competencies, ensuring that emotion becomes a lens for justice rather than a conduit for bias.
Ultimately, the project of rehumanizing the law is both ethical and existential. Justice cannot be achieved by intellect alone; it requires emotional imagination, the ability to see oneself in the story of another. As philosopher Amartya Sen explains in the opening pages of The Idea of Justice, rational inquiry is set in motion by the human response to clearly remedy injustice, revealing that affective concern drives the very practice of reasoning about justice.[xx]
If the courtroom has long been a fortress against feeling, perhaps it is time to open its windows. Emotion does not weaken justice; it illuminates it. The heart, long exiled from the chambers of law, must return, not as a usurper of reason, but as its indispensable companion. A justice system that fails to engage with human feeling risks severing its legitimacy from the community it serves. Legal authority is not sustained by technical precision alone but by public trust, and trust depends on recognition of pain, dignity, and moral worth.
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* Anubhuti Raje is Anubhuti Raje is a final-year law student at Gujarat National Law University, India; Third Prize winner of the European Air Law Association Prize 2025, she frequently writes on human rights, constitutional law and public law.
[i] Martha C Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) at 24.
[ii] John Borrows, Canada’s Indigenous Constitution (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010) at ch 1.
[iii] Carol Smart, Feminism and the Power of Law (London: Routledge, 1989).
[iv] Susan Bandes, “Repression and Denial in Criminal Lawyering” (2006) 9:2 Buff Crim L Rev 339 at 342.
[v] Antonio R Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Putnam, 1994).
[vi] Patrick J Schiltz, “On Being a Happy, Healthy, and Ethical Member of an Unhappy, Unhealthy, and Unethical Profession” (1999) 52:4 Vand L Rev 871.
[vii] Martha C Nussbaum, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013) at 15–17, 120–23, 142–47, 203.
[viii] Damasio, supra note v.
[ix] Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, supra note i at 28.
[x] Catharine A MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).
[xi] [1990] 1 SCR 852.
[xii] Belyea v Syncrude Canada Ltd (2003), 48 CHRR D/295 (AB).
[xiii] Robichaud v Canada (Treasury Board), 1987 CanLII 73 (SCC).
[xiv] David B Wexler & Bruce J Winick, Judging in a Therapeutic Key (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2003).
[xv] Tom R Tyler, Why People Obey the Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006) at 45–47.
[xvi] Lawrence S Krieger & Kennon M Sheldon, “What Makes Lawyers Happy? A Data-Driven Prescription to Redefine Professional Success” (2015) 83 Geo Wash L Rev 554 at 592.
[xvii] Ibid at 615.
[xviii] Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York (NY): Basic Books, 1992).
[xix] R v DD, 2000 SCC 43; Phool Singh v State of Madhya Pradesh, (2022) 2 SCC 74 (HC India); R v Lavallee, [1990] 1 SCR 852; Bugmy v The Queen, 2013 HCA 37; Walden v Hensler, (1987) 163 CLR 561, 75 ALR 173 (HC Austl).
[xx] Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009) at 4–5.