Melissa Harris Lacewell on Empathy, its importance to social cohesion, and more on its importance to good judging.

Wisdom from Melissa Harris Lacewell on the centrality of empathy in creating a United States:

[W]e are participants in a nation only to the extent that we imagine ourselves to be part of a community or a “people.” Empathy is an important part of what allows us to engage in that imagined sense of linked fate, shared identity, and common purpose. Without empathy we cannot enter into a social contract whereby we are willing to subjugate some of our selfish impulses in order to abide by the rule of law and the dictates of a civil society.  

As Laura E. Little points out in “Adjudication and Emotion,” 3 Florida Coastal Law Journal, 205, 210 ( 2002)  , “Empathy . . . may actually facilitate the process of understanding competing points of view so necesssary to quality adjudication. As Judge Richard Posner argues, empathy enables a judge to integrate into her decsionmaking remote human interests that are not immediately before the judge, but are possibly affectetd substantially by the judge’s decsions. Posner praises empathy for its cognitive character, suggesting that the emotion more likely reflects an evaluation of beliefs, rather than an ungrounded emotional reaction that short-circuits reasoning.” [Citing Richard Posner, “Emotions versus Emotionalism in Law,” The Passions of Law (Susan A. Bandes, ed. 1999).