How do researchers study emotion in and around law?

Research on law and emotion has flourished in the last quarter of a century, underpinned by a range of theoretical and philosophical approaches. The field, while deeply interdisciplinary, originally developed around several disciplinary silos through the research of legal practitioners, jurisprudence theorists, social scientists and humanities scholars. Despite the field’s growth, methodological approaches have largely remained disparate. Researchers, all working from within their own disciplinary training, rarely make explicit the definition of ‘emotion’ and ‘law’ with which they are working, nor how the methods they choose to deploy sit in relation to those definitions. This article takes stock of methodologies, methods and data that seek to account for emotion in legal contexts. It aims to identify how law and emotion researchers are doing what they are doing, and to what ends, and seeks to distinguish ‘emotions’ in law and emotions research. It considers various theories of emotion underpinning law and emotion scholarship, canvassing how and to what extent scholars, when researching law and legal actors, are articulating the object of study, ‘emotions’; and takes into account different ways that researchers identify, theorise and deploy the concept of law. The article discusses empirical mixed methods, analysis of material artefacts, creative arts practices, and the place of researcher emotion. An explicit discussion of the different theoretical and philosophical approaches to emotion and to law that underscore current research, will help facilitate a productive cross-pollination of methods, including recognising the utility of different methods for particular research questions.