Argument

Legal institutions and jurists have often perceived themselves and promoted an image of their role and activity as essentially "rational". Yet, emotions have always been integral to the law, particularly in the case of criminal law. Emotions were and are taken explicitly or implicitly into consideration in legal debates, in law-making, in the codified norms and in their application, especially in relation to paramount categories such as free will, individual responsibility and culpability. Moreover, emotions are integral to the dynamics of the courtroom: in judging who is guilty, and who is not.

This two-day conference seeks to historicize the relationship between law and emotions, focusing on the period from the sixteenth century to the present. It aims to ask how legal definitions, categorizations and judgments were influenced by, and themselves influenced, moral and social codes; religious and ideological norms; scientific and medical expertise; and perceptions of the body, gender, age, social status. By examining the period between the sixteenth century and the present day, this conference also seeks to challenge and problematize the demarcation between the early modern and the modern period, looking at patterns and continuities, as well as points of fissure and change, in the relationship between law and
emotions.

Programm

Thursday, 21 May 2015

• 8:00-9:00 Registration
• 9:00-9:40 Welcome and Introduction : Ute Frevert, Laura Kounine and Gian Marco Vidor (all Max Planck Institute for Human Development)
• 9:40-10:40 Keynote : Professor David Sabean (University of California, Los Angeles)
• 10:40-11:00 Coffee Break

11:00-12:45

Panel 1: Early Modern History, Emotions and Law

Co-curated with Claudia Jarzebowski

• Malcolm Gaskill (University of East Anglia): Emotions on the Frontier: Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century New England
• Camilla Schjerning (University of Copenhagen): “As a Raging Man”: Narratives of Transgression and Emotional Communities in Copenhagen, 1771-1800
• Allyson F. Creasman (Carnegie Mellon University): Fighting Words: Anger, Insult, and the “Right of Retort” in Early Modern German Law

Chair: Claudia Jarzebowski (Freie Universität Berlin)

12:45-14:00 Lunch

14:00-15:45

Panel 2: Emotions on Trial

• Katie Barclay (University of Adelaide): Performing Emotion and Reading the Body in the Irish Court, c.1800-1845 
• Elwin Hofman (Catholic University of Leuven): Angry Killers, Weeping Whores? Emotions in Criminal Trials in the Southern Netherlands, 1750-1800
• Shira Leitersdorf-Shkedy (University of Haifa): “The Sensitive Prosecutor”: The Emotional Experience of Prosecutors in Managing Criminal Proceedings

Chair: Stephen Cummins (Max Planck Institute for Human Development)

• 15:45-16:15 Coffee Break
• 16:15-17:00 Reflections : Daniel Lord Smail (Harvard University): Reflections: Violence and Emotions
• 18:00 Dinner After Dinner Talk Terry Maroney (Vanderbilt Law School, Nashville)

Friday, 22 May 2015

10:00-11:00 Keynote : Professor Elizabeth Lunbeck (Vanderbilt University, Nashville)

11:00-11:30 Coffee Break

11:30-13:15

Panel 3: Russia, Borders, Encounters

• Eugene M. Avrutin (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign): The Confrontations: Emotions and the Meaning of Belief in a Russian Border Town
• Marianna Muravyeva (Oxford Brookes University): “He Called me a Pimp and his Mother a Broad”: Emotions of Complaint in the Narratives of Parent Abuse in Early Modern Russia
• Daniel Newman (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum): Emotional Appeals in Early Soviet Criminal Cases: The Plach as Legal Strategy

Chair: Pavel Vasilyev (Max Planck Institute for Human Development)

13:15-14:30 Lunch

14:30-16:15

Panel 4: Emotions and Legal Responsibility

• Niamh Cullen (University College Dublin): Love and Honour in 1960s Sicily: The Trial of Filippo Melodia
• Hiram Kümper (Universität Mannheim): Lust and the Movements of the Will: Emotions in the Forensic Conceptualization of Rape, 16th to 19th Centuries
• Katariina Parhi (University of Oulu): Examining Degenerate Souls: Psychopathy and the Question of Responsibility in Early Twentieth-Century Finnish Forensic Psychiatry

Chair: Daphne Rozenblatt (Max Planck Institute for Human Development)

16:15-16:45 Coffee Break

16:45-18:00 Roundtable with leading commentators Dagmar Ellerbrock (Technische Universität Dresden) and Terry Maroney (Vanderbilt Law School, Nashville)

Organisers

Laura Kounine (MPIB) and Gian Marco Vidor (MPIB)