“This is really a coming home for me,” Prof. Deborah Stone (Heller) remarked on Thursday, opening her second time delivering the Legal Studies Program’s annual Joshua A. Guberman Lecture. For this lecture, Stone spoke on how emotion should be considered when developing social policy and whether and how judicial systems consider emotion.

The questions, “What does it mean to be guided by the Light of Reason? What did it mean for Louis Brandeis? What does it mean now?” were, according to Stone, the framing questions for her discourse.

Stone pointed to “the Light of Reason” sculpture that stands in front of the Rose Art Museum as a symbol of a combination of structure and order with whimsical beauty, and she referenced Justice Louis Brandeis’s success in the maximum labor law case Muller v. Oregon (1908), in which he used an emotional argument to win his case. In Muller v. Oregon, the owner of a laundry business, Curt Muller, was charged a fine for making female employees work shifts longer than ten hours. His appeal went all the way to the Supreme Court, where it was determined that it was in the best interest of women, for physiological and societal reasons, to have a work day limited by law. In his argument, Stone noted, Brandeis was not “an equal opportunity man;” the emotional argument he used was based on gender stereotypes, in particular the ideas that women are too fragile and need a certain amount of time to take care of their families. Nevertheless, the case was a landmark for the integration of emotion into the decision of the court.

Stone then transitioned the discussion to current Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and cited the ways in which Sotomayor represents the importance of emotion in a way that Brandeis did not. Stone referenced Sotomayor’s memoir, “My Beloved World,” in which she says that one must convince a jury that “they have a moral responsibility to do what you believe is right. … The difference between winning and losing [comes] down to the appeal by emotion, rather than fact alone.” To use emotional appeal, according to Sotomayor, is to use the “innate skills of the heart.”

A major difference between Brandeis’s era and the present day — Sotomayor’s era — is “the explosion of brain research in the past 25 years or so that has blurred the line between rationality and emotion and legitimated the idea of emotional intelligence,” Stone said, adding that new knowledge about how the brain functions has changed the way scholars think.

Brandeis and Sotomayor have more in common than their treatment of emotion in the court, Stone declared, as “both Brandeis and Sotomayor were the first member of a stigmatized minority group to be appointed to the Supreme Court. One common element of the negative stereotype of every minority group is the charge that they are less intelligent, less disciplined and more given to unruly emotions and passions than the dominant group.” Individuals trying to break free of these stereotypes “must go out of their way to disconfirm the stereotype.”

Though “since the Enlightenment, emotions have been viewed as distortions of reality,” it cannot be denied that “we need emotions to evaluate and interpret facts and to motivate us to act,” Stone remarked.

As an example of the first of Stone’s three themes within the lecture, how “emotions can contribute to better explanations of social and political phenomena,” she cited that “knowing what to do requires a causal explanation for the problem.” Stone used studies of malnourished communities, including those done in China, Brazil and the Philippines, to prove her point. The study she referenced that had been done in China found that malnourished poor people who were offered rice and wheat at lower prices chose to use their extra money to buy shrimp and meat, instead of more rice and wheat, which would have been the economically efficient choice. “Even the best policy analysis can be oblivious to how emotion shapes other people’s choices,” Stone commented, because in fact “we … derive emotional nourishment from the [food] we eat that is far more important to us than the nutritional value or even the taste.”

Moving onto the second theme of her research — how “emotions serve as evidence” — Stone noted that “once [people] know something to be true, the facts cause them to have feelings about the situation. Emotions … come after facts.” She suggested that this quality is apparent in the U.S.’s decision to declare war on Iraq. Stone says decisions made by politicians normally come about by asking questions such as, “Do they find our threats credible? Do we find their representations of how they are behaving credible?” Despite data from weapons inspectors, the U.S. declared war on Iraq because they “disliked, disrespected and didn’t trust Saddam Hussein,” according to Stone. Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense at the start of the war in Iraq, unknowingly supported Stone’s statement when he said “the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence” in reference to the purported weapons of mass destruction being stashed in Iraq. In short, she argued, the politicians who declared war allowed their own emotion to serve as evidence.

Transitioning to recent world events, Stone brought up the relationship between emotion and refugees who seek asylum, using a study by Cecile Rousseau and Patricia Foxen of individual cases of refugee asylum through the judicial process in Canada. According to the Geneva Convention, Stone noted, the definition of a refugee is “contingent on a well-founded fear for being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.” However, “judges rely on their own emotions to assess the credibility of the individual claimant,” and the claimant must “transmit … [their] experience of trauma … [to prove their] emotion is authentic,” which again forces emotions to determine evidence. The subjectivity of the matter can make the outcome feel unfair.

“Emotions serve as tests of legitimacy,” Stone noted as her third and final theme. Still working off of the Canadian refugee study, Stone said that the “refugees often experience negative emotions just from the way judges look at them … [one woman] portrays her emotional experience of the hearing, apart from the results, as upsetting, demeaning and disrespectful — all emotional elements that go into her judgment of ‘unfair.’” If refugees are made uncomfortable by the asylum process, Stone said, there has been “a violation of Canada’s expressed ideals, making the Canadian government hardly more legitimate than the regime these refugees have fled. … When officials don’t look from the heart, they lose legitimacy.”

Stone has held the David R. Pokross Chair in Law and Social Policy at the Heller School, and has been employed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Duke University, Yale University, Tulane University, Radcliffe College and the University of Bremen, Germany.

Stone’s lecture was titled “Reasoning from the Heart in Law and Policy.” Stone was first a Guberman lecturer in 2003.