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Hello, and welcome to Humanities Matter, brought to you by Brill. I am Emily Tankin, and this week we will be looking at key issues in the field of humanities. I'm speaking today with Lisa Flower of Lund University about her article, Emotional Defense Lawyers, which you can find in the journal Emotions, History, Culture, Society. Lisa, thank you so much for being with me today.
Thanks for having me. Reading through the paper, it's such a fascinating topic, and I was wondering if you could just speak before we get into what it says, if you could speak about how you decided to look at the subject. The original idea came partly from, there's a growing research field of law and emotion, which is trying to uncover the invisible emotions that quite often are tried to make invisible within law, because we don't want to think of law as being an emotional place. It should be based on rationality.
So this is a growing research field, and there's been quite a lot of research done looking at judges, and their emotions and emotion management, but very little, particularly in Sweden, nothing at all. In fact, looking at defense lawyers, emotion management, and their emotion. So specifically looking at defense lawyers was appealing to me because they really haven't had any sociological attention, really. And also because they get quite a lot of suspicion, really.
There's quite a lot of jokes about defense lawyers, and people kind of suspect what they do as being a kind of dirty work, as we also talk about in sociology. So I think they made a really interesting category to kind of look closer at. And looking at the scope of the defense lawyers work, how much of the defense lawyers job, would you say is good or good or emotional? Or do you feel that that's the wrong question and you kind of can't separate the emotional work out from the rest of the work?
Yeah, you absolutely can't separate out because the emotions are always always there, so they are always working with their emotions, whether it is looking at evidence, which could make their stomach turn, which they find quite disgusting, but they need to be able to look at it in a way that where they're just looking to find the evidence. But this also requires them to engage in their emotions. So when they're sitting by themselves, they can see evidence when they're in the courtroom, when they're meeting with clients, in all of these situations, their emotions are always something that they need to be actively working with. So how did you sort of go about, I guess, ask the question in another way.
How did you go about assessing the emotional components to everything the defense lawyers do? Do you mean that method? Well, I did interviews with defense lawyers where I talked to them about their role, about their work. And it's also something that you find that if you ask them head on about emotions, then they're kind of difficult to get to, but you can find different ways and get them talking about things like making a mistake or being irritated with a client or this kind of thing.
But they are very much fooled in learning to not really talk or reflect about emotions. And this is also something that I've written about, about how law students learn about emotions on a law program. So I did interviews with lawyers, and I also did observations of criminal trials in Sweden at district court level. So observing them in the courtroom and then interviewing and asking questions also about what I had observed in the courts.
So I before I let you go, one thing that I thought about while reading through your paper, and actually that I thought about earlier in our conversation when you spoke about how defense lawyers are kind of how they're suspicion toward them. I was thinking about how in the United States right now in progressive circles, there's a lot of skepticism toward prosecutors and toward sort of the criminal justice system or generally in anybody who works to uphold it. And obviously your article is focused on Sweden. I was wondering if you, as you were writing about it or after, if you thought about whether what you found would vary from country to country, right?
Do you think that this piece would look very different if you focused on the United States? Or do you think that there are certain consistencies in the emotional work of defense lawyers from country to country? I did. I've actually just recently published a book where I also compared England and the US and the Swedish systems.
And there are similarities in that in each country, then you do have these emotion rules to follow as a defense lawyer. And there might be similarities in the way you're allowed to feel in the different countries, but the way that you can display it might differ in the different countries. So in my study here, I found that quite often defense lawyers in Sweden try and distance themselves away from a very aggressive style of lawyering, which Jen for Pierce, who did a study in the mid 90s in the US. She described as Rambo litigators that they were very, very aggressive.
But I found that in my study, I actually found that they were more, that the Swedish lawyers are more of a Rambo-Bambi style, because they might be aggressiveness behind a softer, more attune and more in line with the emotional rules of the courtroom, which is more like Bambi. But they can still be very aggressive, but the dislabels of how you are allowed to display emotions in the Swedish courtroom are different to the American rules. Yeah. I have been speaking with Lisa Flower of Lundy University about her article, Emotional Defense Lawyers, which you can find in the journal Emotions.
History, Culture, Society. Lisa, thank you so much for this session today. Thank you very much. You can now find the Humanities Matter podcast by Brill on Spotify, Apple or Google.