Heart Versus Head: Do Judges Follow the Law or Follow Their Feelings?

Emotion is a fundamental aspect of human existence. In normal, healthy people, feelings about options exert a powerful influence on choice. Intuition and anecdote suggest that people react more positively toward others whom they like or for whom they feel sympathy than toward others whom they dislike or for whom they feel disgust. Empirical research in the field of psychology confirms that impression. Experiments also show that this effect extends to legal contexts, revealing that emotional reactions to litigants influence the decisions of mock jurors in hypothetical civil and criminal cases. This Article explores the question whether feelings about litigants also influence judges' decisions. Unlike jurors, judges are expected to put their emotional reactions to litigants aside. Can they do it? The first reported experiments on the topic using actual judges as subjects suggest that they cannot.