Abstract

The essay focuses on the relationship between virtue jurisprudence and legal senti- mentalism to argue that both emphasize the importance of emotions in assessing legal rights and duties. Based on the readings of Aristotle’s normative texts, Nicomachean Ethics, the Rhetoric and Politics, it advances the claims that emotions are elements of virtue so that no judicial virtue can exist without them; and that distributive and corrective justice as the primary virtues of the judge require peculiar emotions. The argument is however based on the assumption that the boundaries of judicial review cannot simply be established by the virtue and proper emotions of the judge