Feel, Show, Tell: affect and legality in the trial as performance

Abstract

In this article I aim to rise to the bait thrown my way by Greta Olson where she posits ( From Law and Literature to Legality and Affect, p.121) that law-and-affect scholarship is anti-narrative, and provocatively imagines that I would shake my head and chuckle, asking what one is to do with the questions asked by scholarship on emotion and affect in actual legal practice. As one spending most of her time in judicial practice I am not only firmly convinced of the importance of narrative in law, what is more, I often have to steep myself in the legal effects of emotion and affect and ask what consequences they should have for the people involved. I will therefore consider the trial as a performance, i.e., a show trial in the positive sense that as a performance shows and tells that it has read well what is brought before the court.