We invite you to the lecture by our researcher Lovrena Jeromelj entitled “Emotional Work in Criminal Justice”, which will be held as part of the Tuesday Meetings on Tuesday, May 13, 2025, at 11 a.m. in the library of the Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana.
At the Tuesday Meeting, the author will present her master’s thesis, in which she examined the emotional work of legal experts in criminal justice. The empirical part of the master’s thesis, which is based on a qualitative analysis of thirty partially structured in-depth interviews with judges, prosecutors and lawyers working in the field of criminal law, is one of the first studies on the emotional work of legal professionals in Slovenia. It is therefore an area in which there is still a lack of empirical research, as it is traditionally characterized by the ideals of rationality, reason and impartiality, and the emotions of those involved are often pushed into the background or even negatively evaluated.
Emotional labor is a sociological concept that examines how individuals manage and express their emotions in accordance with the expectations of the work environment. The concept has received academic attention primarily because of the potential psychological and social consequences for the individuals who perform it and because of the gender dimension, which is reflected in different expectations and the unequal distribution of emotion work between the sexes. The author will present the complexity of this phenomenon and its specificity in the context of criminal justice, where lawyers are regularly confronted with complex emotional challenges during their work, while professional norms impose on them the need to maintain the appearance of professionalism, keep professional distance and control their emotions.
Lovrena Jeromelj is a researcher at the Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana. She holds a Master’s degree in Law from the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana and is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Cultural Sociology at the Faculty of Arts. Her research focuses on the intersection of sociology, law and criminology, with particular attention to social dynamics in the legal profession, feminist legal theory and the role of law in combating social inequalities.
