Rights are typically viewed as embodying interests that are natural, universal or human. This universalizing and objectifying tendency of rights is fundamentally disrupted by the advent of identity in legal discourse, with its emphasis on what is particular about individuals and groups. The aim of this thesis is to find out what identity means for the leading European human rights court, the European Court of Human Rights. In the first part of the thesis, I present a legal analysis of identity by analyzing all rulings mentioning the term 'identity'. Based on a new, systematic and empirically replicable analysis (n=3,362), I demonstrate that the Court's notion of identity is replete with internal contradictions. Yet, the analysis also shows the potential of the Court's notion of identity as a key concept to express a fuller, more complex, and more humane portrayal of the human subject in human rights adjudication. The Court's frequent use of emotions across different identity categories embodies this potential. Most notably in judgments on sexual, familial, and ethnic identity, the Court draws on emotions ranging from a sense of self-confidence to feelings of humiliation and vulnerability to express how the misrecognition of a person's identity might affect their lives. Such judgments show the Court in an exceptionally sensitive light, perceptive to the way identity and the individual's feelings are connected, and how these are impacted by the state. On the other hand, the Court is reluctant to expand on emotional implications for other categories. This gap is most evident in judgments on reputation, citizenship, profession, parents in family cases and religious identity. Hence, the relation between identity and emotions in the case law is imprecise, which constitutes a problem for both legal certainty and substantive justice. In the second part of this thesis, I reflect on this dilemma by reviewing the social theories of Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth as well as the psychological literature on identity and emotions. I argue that the European Court of Human Rights has a complex, multifarious conception of identity, one that challenges established social theories on recognition, but also one that demonstrates flaws and inconsistencies, which can be better informed and systematized by drawing from contemporary psychological findings on identity.

This illuminating Research Handbook analyses the role that emotions play and ought to play in legal reasoning and practice, rejecting the simplistic distinction between reason and emotion.

Subverting the narrative that the legal profession must be austere and controlled, this prescient How To guide addresses the crucial need for holistic, trauma-centred law teaching. It advocates for a healthier, more inclusive profession by identifying strategies to engage, and even encourage, emotions within legal education.

"This book draws on the analytic and political dimensions of queer, alongside the analytic and political usefulness of reading emotion, to navigate legal interventions aimed at addressing the rights of LGBT people. Scholars, activists, lawyers, and judges concerned with eliminating violence and discrimination against LGBT people have generated passionate conversations about pursuing law reform to make LGBT injuries, intimacies, and identities visible, while some challenge the ways legal systems marginalise queer minorities. Senthorun Sunil Raj contributes to these ongoing conversations by using emotion as an analytic frame to reflect on the ways case law seeks to "progress" the intimacies and identities of LGBT people from positions of injury. This book catalogues a range of cases from Australia, United States, and United Kingdom to unpack how emotion shapes the decriminalisation of homosexuality, hate crime interventions, anti-discrimination measures, refugee protection, and marriage equality. While emotional enactments in pro-LGBT jurisprudence enable new forms of recognition and visibility, they can also work, paradoxically, to cover over queer intimacies and identities. Raj shows that reading jurisprudence through emotions can make space in law to affirm, rather than disavow, intimacies and identities that queer conventional ideas about "LGBT progress", without having to abandon legal pursuits to better protect LGBT people. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of human rights law, gender and sexuality studies, and socio-legal theory"--

Constitutional Sentiments provides new insights into the foundations of law, the complexities of legal institutions, and the hidden genealogies of lawmaking. As the book makes clear, constitutions are human creations that embody all aspects of our humanity. It is an example of serious scholarship that will attract readers of all disciplines who have a keen interest in social and political life. --Book Jacket.

From questions surrounding motives to the concept of crimes of passion, the intersection of emotional states and legal practice has long interested professionals as well as the public—recent cases involving extensive pretrial publicity, highly charged evidence, and instances of jury nullification continue to make the subject particularly timely. With these trends in mind, Emotion and the Law brings a rich tradition in social psychology into sharp forensic focus in a unique interdisciplinary volume. Emotion, mood and affective states, plus patterns of conduct that tend to arise from them in legal contexts, are analyzed in theoretical and practical terms, using real-life examples from criminal and civil cases. From these complex situations, contributors provide answers to bedrock questions—what roles affect plays in legal decision making, when these roles are appropriate, and what can be done so that emotion is not misused or exploited in legal procedures—and offer complementary legal and social/cognitive perspectives on these and other salient issues: Positive versus negative affect in legal decision making, emotion, eyewitness memory, and false memory, the influence of emotions on juror decisions, and legal approaches to its control, a terror management theory approach to the understanding of hate crimes, policy recommendations for managing affect in legal proceedings, additional legal areas that can benefit from the study of emotion. Emotion and the Law clarifies theoretical grey areas, revisits current practice, and suggests possibilities for both new scholarship and procedural guidelines, making it a valuable reference for psycho legal researchers, forensic psychologists, and policymakers.

Emotions work to define who we are as well as shape what we do and this is no more powerfully at play than in the world of politics. Ahmed considers how emotions keep us invested in relationships of power, and also shows how this use of emotion could be crucial to areas such as feminist and queer politics. Debates on international terrorism, asylum and migration, as well as reconciliation and reparation, are explored through topical case studies. In this book the difficult issues are confronted head on. The Cultural Politics of Emotion is in dialogue with recent literature on emotions within gender studies, cultural studies, sociology, psychology and philosophy. Throughout the book, Ahmed develops a theory of how emotions work, and the effects they have on our day-to-day lives. New for this editionA substantial 15,000-word Afterword on 'Emotions and Their Objects' which provides an original contribution to the burgeoning field of affect studiesA revised BibliographyUpdated throughout.