Navigating uncertainty and negotiating trust in judicial deliberations.

Autonomy and independence are key features of legal decision-making. Yet, decision-making in court is fundamentally interactional and collective, both during the information gathering phase of hearings, and in evaluations during deliberations. Depending on legal system and type of court, deliberations can include different constellations of lay judges, jurors, or judge panels.

Artificial intelligence and real decisions: predictive systems and generative AI vs. emotive-cognitive legal deliberations.

The use of artificial intelligence in law represents one of the biggest challenges across different legal systems. Supporters of predictive systems believe that decisionmaking could be more efficient, consistent and predictable by using AI. European legislation and legal scholars, however, identify areas where AI developments are at high risk or too dangerous to be used in judicial proceedings.

Expanding emotional capital in court.

This article develops the concept of emotional capital by exposing its operation in proceedings between legal elite professionals. We argue that (a) the micro-structural restraints of the interaction order among the participants have to be accounted for in order to understand the dynamics of emotional capital, and; (b) the emotional processes at play have to be expanded beyond feelings of care showing how emotions can be employed to reproduce status and power. Empirical examples from criminal courts in Scotland and the United States demonstrate that judges and prosecutors depend on emotional capital to steer the legal proceedings.

(Dis)passionate law stories: the emotional processes of encoding narratives in court.

In this conceptual article, we propose that legal professional decision makers' transformation of narratives in court (encoding) influences their emotional attunement to the stories at hand. First, we argue that the process of encoding is linked to the strict demand for dispassion in legal settings. Second, we introduce three techniques that regulate the emotional processes at play during the encoding of law narratives: , , and .