Boundary Work in the Courtroom: Moral-Emotional Contestation and the Making of “Us” and “Them”

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  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 3: Criminal Justice System Actors (1)

Abstract

As social actors, we imagine and organize ourselves in relation to symbolic boundaries, distinguishing ourselves from those we consider different, alien, or “other.” In this paper, I explore the ways that moral and emotional rhetoric in trials is used to activate symbolic boundaries, heightening a sense of in-group and out-group membership and thereby diverging from due-process protections. To do so, I conducted abductive analysis of 60 transcripts of jury trials for violent crimes in a large mid-Atlantic city. My results show that, amidst attorneys’ fact-based advocacy, they strategically appeal to jurors’ morals and emotions through a process I term moral-emotional contestation. This contestation can be distilled into two constitutive acts, moral bids and emotional bids, that work conjointly to activate culturally shared moral rubrics and activate underlying emotional responses. Moral bids can be broadly classified into two types: either moral condemnation, which rests on “bad person” tropes (e.g., bad worker, bad mother, bad citizen), or moral approval in relation to “good person” tropes (e.g., good worker, good mother, good citizen). Meanwhile, emotional bids fall into a similar two-part typology, comprising either “bridging emotions,” through which the attorney evokes a feeling of emotional connection to the subject (e.g., sympathy, trust, compassion) or “distancing emotions,” used to bring forth feeling of emotional disconnection or distance (e.g., outrage, suspicion, contempt). Together, moral and emotional bids work together to activate us-versus-them dichotomies and heighten the “empathic divide.” As such, I argue that attorneys’ moral contestation is best understood as boundary work, used to animate hierarchical moral categorizations as a routinized legal practice in US jury trials.

Author

• Sarah McGill Brown, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill