Rużyczka Katarzyna, Should Judges Be Empathic? The Place of Judges’ Empathy in Therapeutic Jurisprudence

We have recently witnessed the popularization of empathy in the public domain. While there are numerous fields where empathy is a key point of interest as such, this article will focus on empathy in the context of law. However, narrowing it down to this discipline does not solve the problem of undetermined nature of empathy nor its many definitions.

If one considers the beginnings of the concept of empathy, the link between empathy and law may be indistinct. However, numerous links between empathy and law are present in Western literature, especially American literature. This topic is frequently addressed in the context of empathy in legal practice. Discussions in the literature focus on both the positive and the adverse consequences of applying empathy in the legal profession. One of the challenges related to the deliberations on empathy in law is the mere understanding of empathy as a term that later becomes the subject of debates in the contexts of justice, legal systems, lawyers’...