The heuristic value of emotion in legal education: From foundation to experience

This paper explores the connection between emotion and legal education. As a preliminary step, I will argue that the issue of the relationship between emotion and law has a broader scope, which can be defined in terms of philosophy of law or theory of justice. While the inclusion of emotion within these theoretical frameworks offers important insights, it does not, in itself, resolve the challenges posed by a foundationalist approach rooted in rationality. However, I contend that legal education represents a practical arena—one that is internal to the law—where these challenges can be temporarily bracketed or transcended. Through a strategic and experiential leap, legal education can address the otherwise aporetic tensions between emotion and law as understood in a broader, foundational sense. To illustrate this argument, I will examine two specific examples where legal education intersects with the emotional dimension. The first involves a project conducted at a Summer School in Law and Humanities; the second reflects on a case of clinical legal education. Both examples will be presented as internal or hermeneutic perspectives, grounded in practical, immersive experiences that highlight the role of emotion in the development of legal understanding.