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Sentimentalizing and Legal Language. Affect and Emotion in Courtroom Talk

Sentimentalizing and Legal Language (Cover)

Sentimentalizing and Legal Language (Cover)

Bens, Jonas – 2017

In The Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, the International Criminal Court tried the destruction of UNESCO World Heritage sites as a war crime for the first time. In this case, the value of things in relation to the value of persons became the central issue. Based on courtroom ethnography conducted during the proceedings and informed by affect and emotion research, this article identifies the rhetorical practice of sentimentalizing persons and things as an important process of legal meaning-making. Through sentimentalizing, all parties rhetorically produce normative arrangements of bodies by way of emotionally differentiating the relevant persons, things, and other entities from and affectively relating them to each other. Sentimentalizing provides an affective-emotional frame in which to determine the degree of guilt and innocence, justice and injustice.

Title
Sentimentalizing and Legal Language
Author
Bens, Jonas
Publisher
SFB 1171 Affective Societies
Location
Berlin
Date
2017
Identifier
DOI: 10.17169/refubium-25145
Appeared in
Working Paper SFB 1171 Affective Societies 04/17
Language
eng
Type
Text