Research Seminar in Sociology of Law with Lisa Flower

Interactional Justice and Loyalty Work: Exploring the role of emotions in the courtroom

This presentation will show how legal professionals accomplish their role in interaction with others and, in particular, highlights the ways in which defence lawyers do loyalty work – constructing and conveying loyalty in emotionally and interactionally constraining situations. All of this takes place within an overarching framework – the emotional regime of law – which aims to uphold the illusionary dichotomy between rationality and emotionality thus quietening the role of emotions. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldnotes and interviews with defence lawyers, the strategies for how they socially construct their duty of loyalty by negotiating informal and implicit professional and social expectations are presented. Furthermore, the smooth flow of a trial also demands that each legal professional performs their role appropriately, thus the ways of doing such teamwork are also discussed.

This seminar will be hosted online. Follow this link at 13:00 (UTC+1) on 9 February to attend on Zoom.

Lisa Flower is an Associate Lecturer at the Sociology Department, Lund University. Her main research focus is impression and emotion management in the Swedish courtroom. She is currently the Programme Director for the Bachelor's Programme in Criminology and teaches a combination of sociology of emotions, symbolic interaction, ethnography, qualitative research methods, and criminology.