Virtue, Emotion and Imagination in Law and Legal Reasoning

Description

What is the role and value of virtue, emotion and imagination in law and legal reasoning? These new essays, by leading scholars of both law and philosophy, offer striking and exploratory answers to this neglected question. The collection takes a holistic approach, inquiring as to the connections and relations between virtue, emotion and imagination. In addition to the principal focus on adjudication, essays in the collection also engage with a variety of different legal, political and moral contexts: eg criminal law sentencing, the Black Lives Matter movement and professional ethics. A number of different areas of the law are addressed (eg criminal law, constitutional law and tort law) and the issues explored include: the benefits and limits of empathy in legal reasoning; the role of attention and perception in judicial reasoning;, the identification of judicial virtues (such as compassion and humility) and judicial vices (such as callousness and partiality); the values and dangers of certain imaginative devices (eg personification); and the interactive and social dimensions of virtue, emotion and imagination.

Amalia Amaya is British Academy Global Professor at the School of Law, University of Edinburgh, UK, and Research Professor of Philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Maksymilian Del Mar is Professor of Legal Theory and Legal Humanities at Queen Mary University of London, UK.

Virtue, Emotion and Imagination in Law is a nuanced and sophisticated exploration of the multiple ways in which the concepts of emotion, virtue, and imagination intersect, diverge, and enrich one another. It is a gorgeously written book, deeply informed by a wide range of sources, methodologies, and cultural contexts, and including work by some of the most interesting and insightful scholars of our day. * Susan A Bandes, Centennial Professor of Law Emeritus, DePaul University College of Law *