Teaching Feeling: Bringing Emotion into the Law School

Abstract

This paper explores the dynamics of emotion in law and legal classrooms by showing: (1) why foregrounding how law is shaped by emotion better equips students to learn about how law advances and/or inhibits various pursuits of social justice and (2) how emotion functions as a useful pedagogical strategy in the classroom to make students receptive enough to empathetically and critically engage with pressing legal questions about social justice. This paper fleshes out the importance of foregrounding emotions in legal classrooms through an autoethnographic account of designing and teaching an undergraduate elective law module called Law and Emotion. By synthesising critical legal studies, law and emotion scholarship, and social theories of teaching/learning with observations from module design, delivery, assessment, and evaluation, this paper illuminates the pedagogical importance of making law, law teachers, and law students engage critically with their feelings.