Abstract
Criminal trials are often depicted as emotionally challenging and taxing events, at least when it comes to the defendants and the plaintiffs. In line with the cultural script of the dispassionate jurisprudence (Maroney, 2011), the legal actors are assumed to stay objective and unaffected. While the ideological underpinning of this stance relates to the profound division of rationality and emotionality, this image has started to fall apart over the last three decades, inviting more and more researchers to take an interest in the emotional world of legal actors (Bandes, 1999; Bergman Blix and Wettergren, 2018; Maroney, 2015). With great clarity and analytical vigour, Lisa Flower’s Interactional Justice contributes to the growing field of law and emotion and offers rich and novel understandings of the interactional and emotional challenges that defence lawyers face in court.
Throughout the book, Flower convincingly argues that justice is to be understood as an interactional accomplishment, where a fair trial is consolidated by defence lawyers’ loyalty to clients, prosecutors’ commitment to objectivity and judges’ dedication to impartiality. The first two chapters contain a contextualization of the study and the Swedish legal context. The Swedish legal system adheres to a mixture of inquisitorial and adversarial features and, in an international comparison, Swedes are considered to be reserved and guarded. Interactional Justice examines how these factors translate into the emotional regime (a term developed by Reddy, 2001) of criminal trials. The book is based on courtroom observations of criminal trials in Sweden between 2013 and 2017 and interviews with 18 defence lawyers. Flower uses her ethnographic gaze to illustrate how emotional, interactional and ceremonial orders are intertwined in criminal trials.
The third chapter delves into a theoretical discussion of the emotionality of the courtroom. Departing from a Goffmanian perspective on interactions and performances, Flower bridges this theoretical framework with a sociological approach of emotions in organizations. In particular, the influential work of Hochschild (1983) informs the analysis and deepens the understanding of how defence lawyers evoke or suppress emotions with regard to their ‘appropriateness’. One of the merits of this book is the close scrutiny of interactional aspects of defence lawyers’ emotion work. In addition, the analysis explores important aspects of how the notion of professional loyalty forms expectations, self-presentations and actions in court.
In Chapter 4 Flower goes into more depth with the central concept of loyalty. Departing from an elaborate discussion on loyalty as an emotion and as a form of social interaction, Flower shows how loyalty works as a blueprint for defence lawyers’ interactions in court and how these loyal interactions entail a nexus of loyal emotions. Loyalty motivates and gives meaning to defence lawyers’ professional role and also works as a shield when the recurring question of ‘How can you defend a rapist/murderer/terrorist?’ arises. One of the dramaturgical nerves of defence lawyers’ professional performance touches upon the duality of loyalties: the loyalty with clients and the loyalty with the law. This duality poses dilemmas and demands skilled emotion work, as when a client has confessed to a crime while wanting to plead not guilty. With convincing examples and arguments, the author neatly depicts different loyalty layers as well as interactions where defence lawyers’ loyalty work fails and disloyalty occurs.
In the following chapter, Interactional Justice engages in various forms of face-work of defence lawyers. Drawing of Goffman (1956), face-work involves clothing, props, voice, body gestures and facial expressions as different ways of conveying a favourable presentation of self. As the prosecution and the defence in criminal trials often present conflicting versions of the criminal events, these tensions lead to face threats and glitches in the interactional order. Flower offers an exquisite template of different face-work strategies that defence lawyers deploy as they strive to maintain not only their own face but also work to sustain their client’s face as well as their joint ‘team face’. In parallel with dramatic productions, Flower introduces the concept of ‘dramatic reductions’ to understand the importance of not reacting to inconvenient statements or disturbing evidence as a way of conveying loyalty with their client.
Chapter 6 focuses on the emotions and emotion work of defence lawyers. Touching upon fondness, dislike, irritation, happiness, sadness and accounts of ‘losing’ cases, Flower maps (in)appropriate emotions and provides insights into the complex emotion management that is integral with defence lawyers’ professional performance. The implicit emotional order that emerges involves the ability to switch off emotions or transform them into professional tools. Flower highlights the diverse use of empathy and describes it as a ‘vital lawyering tool’. Another central aspect of the defence lawyers’ emotion work is guiding the clients’ expectations in the right direction, navigating between making clients satisfied and providing them with realistic prospects.
In the last chapter, Flower shows how judges, prosecutors and defence lawyers work together to run a smooth trial. Stressing the subtlety of emotional displays in Swedish courts, the ‘unemotional emotionality’ (p. 175), Flower provides a delicate analysis of how headshakes, glances and other rule reminders are used to ensure the accomplishment of a fair and just criminal trial and avoid embarrassment when any professional norms are breached. With regard to the careful and reticent emotional displays pertaining to the Swedish emotional regime in courts, defence lawyers exercise a ‘Rambo Bambi’ strategy when cross-examining plaintiffs and witnesses. This balancing act of determination, aggression and ‘strategical niceness’ (p. 160) is a striking example of the swift and flexible emotion work defence lawyers perform.
Considering how power relations pervade criminal trials, the analysis would have gained in depth by adding an intersectional power dimension. As emotions are intrinsically linked with social position and status, a critical perspective on power could also advance our understanding of how the emotional and interactional orders work in important ways. Another limitation of the study stems from the rather brief explorations of the different emotions that defence lawyers discussed (dislike, fondness, irritation, happiness and sadness). A more thorough and theoretical discussion could have unveiled what these emotions do with regard to the actions and performances they enable and encourage.
Interactional Justice offers a detailed and nuanced examination of loyalty and the emotional regime of criminal trials from the perspective of defence lawyers. The scope of the study may seem narrow at a first glance but as emotions, interactions and teamwork are central aspects of all social life, this book makes a vital contribution to a much wider audience than researchers within the field of law and emotion and legal practitioners. In summarizing her findings, Flower states that in dealing with the emotional and dramaturgical challenges defence lawyers face and manage in their professional lives, ‘emotional savviness is key’ (p. 178). Interactional Justice demonstrates how this is not only true for defence lawyers, as it can be read as an invitation for criminologists and other scholars to develop and enhance their own emotional savviness.