Talk Title: 'Legal Feelings and Mediated Expressions of Law'

Abstract: Why should a legal practitioner care about fictional representations of law or about individuals’ and groups’ affective relations to law? To answer this question, this talk introduces the concepts of legality – all kinds of expressions of the legal – and Rechtsgefühle – impassioned feelings about law and justice. Because law is so specialized a discipline and legal language so hermetic, the majority of individuals take in information about law through exchanges in social media, journalistic reports on selected criminal trials, or through televisual law. Popular legality is then law in that it is what people take law to be. Understanding people’s affective responses to law as legality enables one to address those places in which mediated, popular, and imagined law steps in to influence people’s passionate attachments to ‘their’ laws, as in the 2016 EU membership referendum, their felt legal identities, and their sense of how law should be. Grasping the relationship between legality and Rechtsgefühle gives us tools to the affective politics of the present.