In 2019 the University of Bristol Law School organised the annual Socio-Legal Studies Association Conference. I was able to attend thanks to the support that the Sociological Review Foundation offers to Early Career Researchers. The main venue was the breathtaking neo-gothic Will Memorial Building, and we were taken for a tour of Bristol Street Art. An experienced guide took us through the hills of Bristol city centre, where pieces from Banksy and STIK were revealed to us. Bristol Council has recently embraced a collaborative approach with these artists, commissioning street art as part of renovative infrastructure projects. These changes set the scene for the themes of the conference.
At the conference, I joined the ‘stream’ on Law and Emotions', where I presented the work-in-progress paper The Moral Rhetoric of a Civilized Society or: Consent- it is a Defence When We Say So. It concerns the construction of unlawfulness in the context of consensual sexual intercourse leading to harmful consequences. The aim of this research is to understand how emotions affect judicial decisions. In the presentation, I argued that the (ir)rationality of the law could be, at times, explained through the rationality of emotional expression, where I endeavoured to assess the case of ‘disgust’.
You can read the full entry in The Sociological Review.
Menis, S.(2019, April 3).The Moral Rhetoric of a Civilized Society [Online].The Sociological Review Magazine.https://thesociologicalreview.org/collections/event-reports/the-moral-rhetoric-of-a-civilized-society/