The status of women in law (and not only theirs) is linked to social and cultural perceptions of women’s desirable behavior. Going against well-established patterns is not indifferent in both legal and social terms. One of the primary contexts of ‘femininity’ in the law is close relationships, in which women are viewed through the ‘role’ of a mother and wife. The purpose of this paper is to determine how the cultural script of romantic love and the emotions associated with it affect perceptions of women in close relationships, such as marriage and parenthood. It assumes that the emotions of participants in legal discourse – dogmatists and those involved in the law-making process – influence the final shape of legal regulations. The cultural script that influences how women are perceived in law is romantic love. To illustrate the issue, the case study of the Infertility Treatment Act is presented in this article. This case shows that from a legal perspective, a woman is seen in indivisible roles in a close relationship of a wife (partner) and mother.
Emotions and law are often thought to be mutually exclusive. However, ever more academicians note that this is not the whole picture: since the late 1980s and early 90s studies on the relationship between the legal and the affective began to be conducted. Since then, both the number of works and number of researchers working on this problem grew significantly. Calls for the identification of a separate trend resulted in dubbing this new enterprise ‘Law & Emotions’. This article collates and synthesizes notes from the field: it is based on the analysis of numerous findings and approaches of the aforementioned research movement. It is written with a Polish reader in mind. As Polish jurisprudence is notably silent on the presence of affect in legal institutions, the objective of the text is to provide a cross-section of Law & Emotions, expose its mission and suggest in what ways it may revolutionize contemporary legal thinking movement – and, hopefully, to show why Polish legal scholars should care about it.
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