Law, Reason, and Emotion

This book examines the role and importance of reason and emotion in justice and the law. Eight lawyers and philosophers of law consider law's basis in the universal human need for society, our innate sense of justice, and many other powerful inclinations and emotions, including the desire for fairness and even for law itself. Human beings are deeply social creatures, inspired by social and other emotions, which can ennoble, support, or undermine the law. Law gains legitimacy and effectiveness when reason recognizes and embraces human emotions for the benefit of society as a whole. This volume explores the power and purposes of reason and emotion in the law.

1. Introduction M. N. S. Sellers; 2. Law, reason, and emotion M. N. S. Sellers; 3. Law's emotions Robin West; 4. The domestication of emotion András Sajó; 5. Neuroscience, philosophy, and the foundations of legal justice Matthias Mahlmann; 6. Rights, reason, and emotion Daniel Mendonca Bonnet; 7. Law and honor Anthony Appiah; 8. Interactive reason and law Ko Hasegawa; 9. The wrath of reason Patricia Mindus.

M. N. S. Sellers is Regents Professor of the University System of Maryland, Director of the University of Baltimore Center for International and Comparative Law, and president of the International Association for the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy (IVR). He was educated at Harvard College, Harvard Law School, and at University and Wolfson Colleges, Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, a Frank Knox Fellow, and the T. H. Green Scholar. Professor Sellers is co-editor (with Stephan Kirste) of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy (forthcoming) and general editor of the book series IVR Studies in the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy. He has been the H. L. A. Hart Fellow at University College, Oxford, a Lauterpacht Fellow at the University of Cambridge, and the EACLE Professor of Law at Erasmus University, Rotterdam. Among his many books on law and the philosophy of law are: The Sacred Fire of Liberty: Republicanism, Liberalism, and the Law (1998), Republican Legal Theory (2003) and Parochialism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Foundations of International Law (2012).