Abstract
Recent statements on the rule of law observe its retreat in many jurisdictions, including states such as the United States where the rule of law has been considered by many to be well-established and stable. Beyond analyzing the degree and manner in which government officials have rejected or ignored the rule of law principles, how should we respond to developments that seem to challenge its existence? The most important demands made by the rule of law include the obligations of persons in authority to exercise their power within a constraining framework of established public norms rather than in an arbitrary or discretionary manner based on their own preferences or ideology. Emotions would not only seem not to belong in these principles, but be antithetical. This essay considers the role of emotions in how individuals subject to non-compliant official actions can think about and respond to rule of law failures. The essay argues that rule of law jurisprudence needs a concept that integrates rationality and emotion, and that hope and a secular version of faith have a role to play in sustaining the rule of law.
I. Introduction
Recent statements on the rule of law observe its retreat in many jurisdictions, 1 including states such as the United States where the rule of law had been considered by many to be well-established and stable. 2 Beyond analyzing the degree and manner in which officials have engaged in non-compliant actions, such as ignoring or rejecting rule of law principles, how should we think about and respond, not to smaller deviations which are quickly remedied, 3 but to larger levels of non-compliance that seem to challenge the rule of law’s existence?
Within rule of law literature, some scholars have proposed concepts to understand how the rule of law works and how to implement it in practice. 4 Addressing the conditions required to realize the rule of law, Gerald Postema has argued for the fidelity thesis, 5 which he characterizes as an ethical matter 6 (the ‘fidelity ethos’). 7 In addition to standards of legality, that is, ‘the formal, procedural, and institutional aspects of the ideal’, the rule of law comprises ‘a set of relationships and responsibilities rooted in core convictions and commitments, which are essential for the realization’ of the rule of law. 8 Postema associates this set of relationships with fidelity to law, which he defines as ‘a robust practice of holding each other accountable under the law’. 9 When making decisions subject to law, government and other officials must follow the law, but the fidelity ethos applies to everyone subject to the rule of law. All members of a society have an obligation to hold themselves, each other, and law’s officials accountable to the law. 10
Postema’s concept of fidelity establishes an ethical framework that could be used to sustain the rule of law when it is under attack, but it leaves something out, particularly for persons subject to non-compliant government actions. The fidelity ethos asserts that these individuals have an obligation to take steps to hold officials accountable, and while this action involves rationality, 11 for example, evaluations of what officials should have done and what was actually done, it also entails aspects of emotion. 12
II. The Role of Emotions in the Fidelity Ethos
2. Valuing the Rule of Law
Individuals considering actions to hold officials accountable to the rule of law would first have to see the value of the rule of law principles. The act of seeing the value of a principle implies emotions, a point demonstrated by the work of Antonio Damasio 13 and others. 14 Damasio studied patients with impairments to parts of the brain that address emotion. 15 These patients could process factual information and generate a range of possible actions, but they could not make simple choices, or they made irrational choices. 16 They could not attribute meaning sufficient to choose between alternatives because, per Damasio, that requires choices be assigned a value, and value is derived from association with an emotional condition. This research suggests that it is not possible to completely separate emotion from rationality (‘Descartes’ error’). 17 Damasio was not championing emotion, but rather calling for its proper integration into human thought: ‘I am not suggesting that emotions are a substitute for reason or that they decide for us. Nor am I denying that excessive emotion can breed irrationality. I am saying only that new neurological evidence suggests that no emotion at all is an even greater problem. Emotion may well be the support system without which the edifice of reason cannot function properly and may even collapse’. 18
Damasio was discussing the nature of thought, not law, but to the extent that law is based on values, this research supports an integration of emotion. Postema’s fidelity ethos imposes a duty on individuals to act within their abilities to hold officials accountable to the rule of law, and for this to work, individuals would need to recognize the value of the rule of law and prioritize it. The values contained within the rule of law may be easier to see in thick definitions of the rule of law, as they can be more readily equated with the values reflected by substantive concepts such as human rights. 19 However, this essay focuses on government compliance with thin definitions of the rule of law that emphasize official compliance with legal rules, 20 and this concept is also based on values, such as predictability 21 and fairness.
2.1. Reason and Emotion in Responses to Rule of Law Failures
Emotions help to establish the value of the rule of law and award significance to rule of law failures, but they also play a central role in individual reactions to violations of law and decisions about whether to take responsive action. 22 In the context of the mobilization of rights, Kathryn Abrams has discussed the role emotions play in the process of rights recognition and assertion. 23 Abrams notes different examples, such as the worker, ‘anxiously weighing his outrage at an injury against his fear of retaliation or the disruption that would arise from a lawsuit’, and the ‘buoyant emotions of public rights mobilization: the excitement and elevation of being part of a cause bigger than oneself; the ardent hope for an envisioned future; the joy or pleasure in public theatre; the anger or outrage at being thwarted; the sense of warmth or connection to one’s fellow activists’. 24 There may also be an ‘ambivalent aftermath’ to rights assertion, including ‘the disappointment, pain, or confusion that may flow from seeing one’s vision confined to a domesticated legal form, or seeing oneself as a victim, albeit of a recognized legal wrong’. 25
Abrams acknowledges that the emotions an individual experiences when subjected to a violation of their rights are likely to vary with the nature of the violation and the person experiencing it: grief or shock at a devastating life change, fear regarding the present or future impact of the violation, or anger regarding their suffering or the suffering of others. 26 However, the emotion of self-respect, ‘the sense of oneself as a person who is entitled to some basic level of decent treatment by others, or to better than the injurious treatment that she has received’, 27 is required before a victim of rights violation can consider holding someone else accountable. Self-respect may ‘determine whether the person perceiving an injury is able to move from fear or shame, both of which tend to immobilize or turn the injured party inward, into outrage or indignation, which can fuel outward-directed efforts to stop the injury or to seek some form of redress’. 28
Some rule of law commentators have alluded to responses to rule of law failures that include emotions, primarily via discussions of trust and mistrust. Thomas Simpson observed that a central part of the value of the rule of law is that it creates a stable social order in which relationships and outcomes are reasonably predictable. 29 He argued that there is a reciprocal relationship between the rule of law and a culture of trust, in that the rule of law promotes a culture of trust, and a culture of trust promotes the rule of law. 30 The absence of the rule of law has a corollary undermining effect, 31 in that a culture of trust promotes the rule of law but a culture of distrust undermines it. 32 Compliance with the rule of law would seem to promote stability and, in turn, encourage trust in outcomes, but in her critique of Simpson’s argument, Onora O’Neill observed that when people assume others are trustworthy, that can expand opportunities for breaches of trust. 33 O’Neill suggests that what is needed is to place and refuse trust intelligently and well, which is a complex matter, 34 particularly in view of widespread misinformation and disinformation. 35 This discussion of trust and mistrust demonstrates that negative emotions can potentially play a positive role in the fidelity ethos. Non-compliance by government officials may encourage emotions such as anger, 36 which in turn may prompt the pursuit of accountability. Arguably, some degree of non-compliance would serve to create a positive form of distrust in the form of vigilance. Postema argues that what is needed is ‘a nuanced understanding of trust and distrust as they occur in civic and political contexts and the ways in which being held to account engages these attitudes’. 37
In a society where the rule of law is working fairly well, there appears to be a healthy balance of trust and mistrust. However, that is quite different from the mistrust experienced by societies where government officials do not follow the rule of law. Depending on the context, emotional reactions to rule of law failures include resentment. 38 Resentment builds when officials expect citizens to fulfil certain duties, such as obedience to law, but do not fulfil their reciprocal duties. 39 There can also be fear and uncertainty, 40 and fear for the rule of law. 41 Lastly, rule of law failures can produce cynicism and despair. 42 Despair is antithetical to Postema’s fidelity ethos, because, similar to fear, which induces profound caution, 43 and shame, which turns injury inward and can immobilize individuals, 44 despair can entangle and paralyze 45 the individuals who are supposed to be holding government officials accountable. In order to work, the fidelity ethos requires an emotional state, which could initially be stated in a negative way, that is, persons subject to rule of law failures cannot be cynical about these failures, accepting them as the expected or inevitable state of affairs. 46 Cynicism has been defined as an inclination to doubt the worth of something, and a sole concern for one’s own interests coupled with the belief that people in general are motivated purely by self-interest. 47 Individuals may, of course, choose to be cynical in the face of official failures to comply with the rule of law, but that choice does not sustain the rule of law in a polity. 48 What would?
III. Sustaining the Rule of Law: Hope and Faith
Because rule of law failures provide evidence to support cynicism, individuals subject to larger-scale non-compliance by government officials require something beyond the purely rational, a concept that recognizes the respective roles of both reason and emotion. Based on Postema’s fidelity ethos, in which all members of society should hold others accountable to the rule of law, the concept would recognize the value of the idea of the rule of law and support accountability despite apparent failures. In a climate of rule of law failures, the concept would need to assist individuals 49 to move beyond the evidence, 50 to a sustained valuing of rule of law principles, coupled with reasonable actions in support of accountability. This essay identifies and briefly analyses three potentially useful concepts: belief, hope, and faith. These concepts all have long intellectual histories, as well as contested definitions which overlap to some degree, and given length constraints discussion is necessarily abbreviated.
3. Belief
The concept of belief is the least suited to the task of organizing reason and emotion in a way that assists individuals to respond to larger-scale failures in the rule of law. Per Eric Schwitzgebel, anglophone philosophers generally use the term ‘belief’ to refer to the attitude we have when we take something to be the case or regard it as true. 51 Some dictionary definitions also include the two elements of conviction and truth, for example, belief is a ‘conviction of the truth of some statement or the reality of some being or phenomenon, especially when based on examination of evidence’. 52 The difficulty here is that although the value of rule of law compliance needs to be recognized, it does not seem right to say that the norm of the rule of law is true, and as an empirical matter, current assessments indicate that there are larger-scale failures in the rule of law.
3.1. Hope
When used in connection with the rule of law, the concept of hope may strike some scholars as wrong or inappropriate, 53 but law and emotion scholars have developed the concept in helpful ways relevant to law. Kathryn Abrams and Hila Keren have defined hope as ‘the capacity to envision and direct oneself toward a goal – a future different from the present – which may be difficult, though not impossible, to achieve’. 54 This definition is consistent with the classic analysis of hope (the ‘standard account’), which comprehends hope as a compound attitude, comprising a desire for an outcome and a belief in that outcome’s possibility. 55 The Oxford English Dictionary defines the verb form of hope as entertaining the expectation of something desired, to look mentally with expectation, and the noun form of hope as the expectation of something desired. 56 Old English usage included a noun meaning a small enclosed valley, especially ‘a smaller opening branching out from the main dale’, 57 that is, an observable means of exit. These sources suggest that hope includes a desire to attain something, together with some expectation that it will be attained.
Without the emotion of hope, Abrams notes that it is highly likely that ‘those suffering a wrong or injury will perceive even highly undesirable states of affairs as natural, inevitable, or at least dauntingly difficult to change’. 58 Hope is a positive emotion, one with considerable relevance to law because of its ‘immense importance for individuals or groups who face material disadvantage, inequality, or despair’. 59 In their definition, Abrams and Keren note that as in the faith-based understanding, ‘hope is oriented toward a goal’, with one ‘attribute of the goal [being] its goodness’. 60 In this sense, hope connects with the values inherent in the rule of law. Hope also supports the accountability aspect of the fidelity ethos, because another ‘central attribute of hope’s object is its quality as “arduous and difficult but nevertheless possible to obtain”’, a quality which ‘underscores the human agency involved in hoping’. 61 Hope is a crucial part of sustaining the rule of law, not only because the positive emotion associated with the values of the rule of law counters the emotions of despair and fear that can immobilize individuals, but because hope incorporates skills or qualities that allow individuals to recognize and work around obstacles. Abrams and Keren suggest that these qualities include the ability to ‘imagine new possibilities not encompassed by one’s present condition; a sense of agency sufficient to consider oneself capable of pursuing, and attaining, distant objectives; and adequate imaginative, strategic, and material resources to develop, assess, and implement means for realizing such goals’. 62 This list is a demanding one, but because it articulates hope in a way that combines key aspects of rationality and emotion, it holds considerable promise for the fidelity ethos and the possibility of sustaining the rule of law.
3.2. Faith
If there is no legitimate hope for rule of law accountability, the way forward would not be clear. Postema provides the example of the period of Jim Crow in the United States, a government-supported scheme of racial segregation in which racial domination was carried out through rape, kidnapping, terror and murder. 63 Postema acknowledges that ‘to attempt to hold another accountable under the law in the face of massive infidelity may not be rational’. 64 In an environment where the fidelity ethos does not function, the concept of faith in the idea of rule of law may be part of the answer.
Faith in the rule of law may seem an ill fit with rule of law needs, in part because it is associated with religious faith, theistic or otherwise. 65 An established use of faith in the legal context is the concept of civil religion, 66 applied to the US legal system via the concept of ‘constitutional faith’, 67 and both ideas incorporate theistic belief. However, in the context of psychiatry and spirituality, George Vaillant has argued that spirituality ‘is not about sacred texts and theology’, but rather ‘emotions and social connection’. 68 Faith 69 is a positive emotion, and while negative emotions help us survive, positive emotions make it possible to ‘broaden and build’, helping us survive ‘the future time’. 70
Faith has been used in secular circumstances. 71 John Bishop and Daniel McKaughan suggest that faith involves a kind of ‘active venture’ in commitment, with venture defined as an ‘action that places the agent and outcomes of concern to the agent significantly beyond the agent’s own control’. 72 If faith is understood as a ‘commitment beyond independent inter-subjective evidential support to the truth of some overall interpretation of experience and reality, then all who commit themselves (with sufficient steadfastness) to such a. . .worldview will be people of faith’. 73 The idea of secular faith has also been explored by Annette Baier. 74 Baier does not address the rule of law, but she suggests that the secular equivalent of faith in God is ‘faith in the human community and its evolving procedures’. 75 For rational persons, faith must not fly in the face of inductive evidence, ‘but it may go beyond it, when there are good reasons of another sort to do so’. 76 Secular faith is faith in the possibility of the desired society, 77 and faith in the rule of law would be faith in the possibility of a society governed by the rule of law. The lack of evidence does not make faith an irrational choice as long as the idea of the rule of law is distinguished from its attainment, and fundamental uncertainty regarding its attainment is accepted. As a positive emotion tied to the values underlying the rule of law, faith may help to sustain this idea when it does not seem possible.
IV. Conclusion
Rule of law, in jurisprudence and theory, has not embraced the relevance of law and emotion research despite considerable development in the field. 78 Law may in the large part be reasoned judgement, but ‘it also engages forces beyond reason, like most other things in life’. 79 Interdisciplinary work has always been hard to do, 80 but the current extent of rule of law failures suggests that it is time to develop even more workable ideas about how to sustain the rule of law, and recognizing the role of emotion in sustaining the rule of law is part of what is required. Collective emotional realities will differ across jurisdictional and other boundaries, but the fact that emotions are part of rational cognition as well as law, and the need for rule of law jurisprudence to take emotional responses into account, are both required to sustain the rule of law when it is under attack.
Footnotes
1.
See World Justice Project Rule of Law Index 2024 (for ‘the seventh year in a row, the rule of law has declined globally’, 
), and Gerald J. Postema, “The Rule of Law,” in Elgar Encyclopedia of Comparative Law, 2nd ed., ed. Jan M. Smits (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2012), 360 (‘the idea of rule of law has been invoked with increasing urgency, accompanied by despair over its precipitous decline’).
2.
See for example, Antara Haldar, “Legal Emotions: Why Affect Matters,” in Human Minds and Culture, ed. Sanjit Chakraborty (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2024), 123, 124, and Rolando T. Acosta, “A Crisis of Faith (in the Rule of Law),” New York Law Journal (Online) (April 30, 2021); but see Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York, NY: New Press, Jackson, TN, 2012).
3.
Gerald J. Postema, “An ‘Almost Sacred Responsibility’: The Rule of Law in Times of Peril,” Judicature 107, no. 3 (2024): 17, 21 (‘the rule of law is threatened by impunity, not by infractions’).
4.
Regarding the fidelity thesis, see Gerald J. Postema, “Fidelity in Law’s Commonwealth,” in Private Law and the Rule of Law, eds. Lisa M. Austin and Dennis Klimchuk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 17, and regarding cultures of trust, see Thomas Simpson, “Trust and the Rule of Law,” in Conversations in Philosophy, Law, and Politics, eds. Ruth Chang and Amia Srinivasan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), 99, and Onora O’Neill, “Cultures of Trust and the Rule of Law,” in Conversations in Philosophy, Law, and Politics, eds. Ruth Chang and Amia Srinivasan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), 121.
5.
Postema, “Fidelity in Law’s Commonwealth,” 19.
6.
Ibid., 20.
7.
Postema, “The Rule of Law in Times of Peril,” 17, 18, 21.
8.
Postema, “Fidelity in Law’s Commonwealth,” 20.
9.
Ibid.
10.
Ibid., 30.
11.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines rationality as the ‘quality or condition of possessing reason’ and ‘the ability to exercise reason’ (‘rationality (n.)’, Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford UP, June 2025)). The interdisciplinary nature of law and emotions raises a terminology issue regarding the use of ‘reason’ and ‘emotion’, because emotion seems to be a part of reason. As the terms reason and emotion are well established, this essay adopts the common usage which sees them as different and distinct, with the caveat that both terms incorporate each other to some degree.
12.
There is no uniformly accepted definition of emotion, and this essay adopts Kathryn Abrams approach to emotions as processes formed in a social context, which influence ‘the way we screen, categorize and interpret information’ (Kathryn Abrams, “Emotions in the Mobilization of Rights,” Harvard Civil Rights Civil Liberties Law Review 46 (2011): 551, 552, quoting Susan A. Bandes, “Victims, ‘Closure’, and the Sociology of Emotion,” Law & Contemporary Problems, 72 (2009): 1, 6–7.
13.
See Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York, NY: G.P. Putnam, 1994), and Antonio R. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York, NY: Harcourt Brace, 1999).
14.
See for example, Ronald de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987).
15.
Antonio Damasio, “Descartes’ Error and the Future of Human Life,” in The Nature of Memory, ed. James McConkey (New York, NY; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 60–3.
16.
Damasio, “Descartes’ Error and the Future of Human Life,” 61.
17.
See also Julia J. A. Shaw, Law and the Passions: Why Emotion Matters for Justice (Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2020), 10 (the capacity to reason without emotion is a ‘sheer impossibility’).
18.
Damasio, “Descartes’ Error and the Future of Human Life,” 62.
19.
In “The Rule of Law,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, eds. Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman (Stanford, CA: Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, Fall 2023); Jeremy Waldron attributes the concept of a thick rule of law to Tom Bingham, The Rule of Law (London: Allen Lane, 2010); see also Brian Z. Tamanaha, “A Concise Guide to the Rule of Law,” in Relocating the Rule of Law, eds. Neil Walker and Gianluigi Palombella (Portland, OR: Hart Publishing, 2009), 3, 3–4, and see Jørgen Møller and Svend-Erik Skaaning, “Systematizing Thin and Thick Conceptions of the Rule of Law,” The Justice System Journal 33, no. 2 (2012): 136.
20.
Waldron, “The Rule of Law” (the “most important demand of the Rule of Law is that people in positions of authority should exercise their power within a constraining framework of well-established public norms rather than in an arbitrary, ad hoc, or purely discretionary manner on the basis of their own preferences or ideology”). Waldron attributes the concept of a thin rule of law to Joseph Raz, citing Joseph Raz, “The Rule of Law and its Virtue,” in The Authority of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
21.
Waldron, “The Rule of Law,” citing Friedrich August von Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1960).
22.
See Renée Jeffery, Reason and Emotion in International Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 158 (‘emotions play a key role in motivating moral action’).
23.
Abrams, “Emotions in the Mobilization of Rights,” 551, 552.
24.
Ibid., 552.
25.
Ibid.
26.
Ibid., 554.
27.
Ibid., 555.
28.
Ibid.
29.
Simpson, “Trust and the Rule of Law,” 99.
30.
Ibid.
31.
Ibid., 100.
32.
Ibid.
33.
O’Neill, “Cultures of Trust and the Rule of Law,” 121.
34.
Ibid., 123.
35.
Ibid., 124.
36.
Dan Kahan and Martha Nussbaum define anger as someone’s belief that another ‘has wronged him (or someone or something dear to him), not inadvertently but deliberately, or perhaps negligently or recklessly, in a more than trivial way’, in Dan Kahan and Martha Nussbaum, “Two Conceptions of Emotion in Criminal Law,” Columbia Law Review 96, no. 2 (1996): 269, 283.
37.
Gerald J. Postema, “Trust, Distrust, and the Rule of Law,” in Fiduciaries and Trust, eds. Paul B. Miller and Matthew Harding (Cambridge: CUP, 2020), 242, 244.
38.
Coleen Murphy, “Lon Fuller and the Moral Value of The Rule of Law,” Law and Philosophy 24 (2005): 239, 245 (in the context of citizen disappearances during military rule in Argentina, it is ‘unsurprising that citizens feel anger and resentment when government officials violate the rule of law’).
39.
Murphy, “Lon Fuller and the Moral Value of The Rule of Law,” 242, citing Lon Fuller, Morality of Law, rev. ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969), 33–8.
40.
Murphy, “Lon Fuller and the Moral Value of The Rule of Law,” 253 (authoritarian regimes ‘hoping to discourage the citizenry from genuine political participation can also more easily achieve this end in an environment dominated by fear and uncertainty which encourages compliance with government demands’).
41.
Paul Gowder, “The Dangers to the American Rule of Law Will Outlast the Next Election,” Cardoza Law Review De Novo 42 (2020): 126, 127, 131, 132 n. 17 and 139–139 n. 47 (‘we can see the rule of law as a fear-reducing social innovation’).
42.
Bennett L. Gershman, “Despair for Democracy,” Pace Law Review 44 (2024): 437, 439.
43.
Kathryn Abrams and Hila Keren, “Law in the Cultivation of Hope,” California Law Review 95 (2009): 319, 326.
44.
Abrams, “Emotions in the Mobilization of Rights,” 554, 555.
45.
Abrams and Keren, “Law in the Cultivation of Hope,” 327.
46.
Abrams, “Emotions in the Mobilization of Rights,” 553 n. 5, citing William L. F. Felsteiner, Richard L. Abel and Austin Sarat, “The Emergence and Transformation of Disputes: Naming, Blaming, Claiming . . .,” Law & Society Review 15 (1980–1981): 631.
47.
‘cynicism (n.)’, Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford UP, December 2024).
48.
See Haldar, “Legal Emotions,” 125–6 (citing Hart and others for the proposition that the law requires participants to assume an ‘internal point of view’ that accepts rules).
49.
This essay focuses on individuals and the internal concepts needed to support the fidelity ethos, but it is clear that assertions of rights and actions regarding accountability occur in social settings, and that the emotions in these settings can encourage or discourage individual decisions and actions regarding the accountability of others; see Abrams, “Emotions in the Mobilization of Rights,” 555.
50.
Quoting Cornel West, Abrams and Keren distinguish hope from optimism, noting that optimism ‘adopts the rule of the spectator who surveys the evidence in order to infer that things are going to get better. . .Hope entails the stance of the participant, who actively struggles against the evidence in order to change’ (Abrams and Keren, “Law and the Cultivation of Hope,” 326 n. 17).
51.
Eric Schwitzgebel, “Belief,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, eds. Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman (Stanford, CA: Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, Spring 2024).
52.
53.
See George E. Vaillant, “Positive Emotions, Spirituality and the Practice of Psychiatry,” Mens Sana Monograph 6, no. 1 (2008): 48 (we may ‘mumble words like hope, love and joy, but then we roll our eyes and change the subject’).
54.
Abrams and Keren, “Law in the Cultivation of Hope,” 324.
55.
Claudia Bloeser and Titus Stahl, “Hope,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Stanford, CA: Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, Summer 2022), citing A. Meirav, “The Nature of Hope,” Ratio 22, no. 2 (2009): 216, 217.
56.
“Hope, N. (1),” Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford UP, June 2025).
57.
Ibid.
58.
Abrams, “Emotions in the Mobilization of Rights,” 555.
59.
Abrams and Keren, “Law in the Cultivation of Hope,” 321.
60.
Ibid., 325.
61.
Ibid.
62.
Ibid., 322, and see pp. 330–7.
63.
Postema, “Fidelity in Law’s Commonwealth,” 22.
64.
Ibid., 38.
65.
John Bishop and Daniel McKaughan, “Faith,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, eds. Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman (Stanford, CA: Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, Winter 2023).
66.
Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96, no. 1 (1967): 1, reprinted in 1988 and 2005.
67.
Sanford Levinson, “‘The Constitution’ in American Civil Religion,” The Supreme Court Review 1979 (1979): 123, and Sanford Levinson, Constitutional Faith (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988).
68.
Vaillant, “Positive Emotions”; see also Johnny Ramírez-Johnson et al, “Is Faith an Emotion?: Faith as a Meaning-Making Affective Process: An Example from Breast Cancer Patients,” American Behavioral Scientist 45, no. 12 (2002): 1839.
69.
Valliant uses faith interchangeably with trust, while this essay distinguishes between these concepts.
70.
Vaillant, “Positive Emotions,” 48.
71.
Bishop and McKaughan, “Faith.”
72.
Ibid.
73.
Ibid.
74.
Annette Baier, “Secular Faith,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy X, no. 1 (1980): 131.
75.
Ibid., 133.
76.
Ibid.
77.
Ibid., 147.
78.
See Emily K. White, “An International Law of the Emotions,” in The Cambridge History of International Law, ed. Randall Lesaffer, vol. XII (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), 1, 2, n 5, Chapter 37, citing Susan A. Bandes (ed.), The Passions of Law (New York, NY: New York University Press, 1999); Susan A. Bandes et al. (eds), Research Handbook on Law and Emotion (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, 2021); Terry A. Maroney, “Law and Emotion: A Proposed Taxonomy of an Emerging Field,” Law and Human Behavior 30 (2006): 119–42; Kathryn Abrams and Hila Keren, “Who’s Afraid of Law and the Emotions?,” Minnesota Law Review 94 (2010): 1997–2074; Martha Craven Nussbaum, Political Emotions: Why Love is Necessary for Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013); and Amalia Amaya and Maksymilian Del Mar (eds), Virtue, Emotion and Imagination in Law and Legal Reasoning (Chicago, IL: Hart Publishing, 2020).
79.
Paul Gewirtz, “Aeschylus’ Law,” Harvard Law Review 10 (1988): 1049.
80.
Stanley Fish, “Being Interdisciplinary Is So Very Hard to Do,” Profession 1989 (1989): 15.