|
|
Culture of Empathy
Builder:
Thomas Colby
Pending - in development
|
|
|
Thomas
Colby and Edwin Rutsch: Dialogs on How to Build a Culture of Empathy
|
|
|
|
Professor
Colby joined the GW law faculty in 2003. He teaches constitutional law and
civil procedure, and was chosen by a vote of the graduating class of 2006
as the recipient of the Law School’s Distinguished Faculty Service Award.
His articles have been published in the Duke Law Journal (forthcoming), the
University of Chicago Law Review (forthcoming), the Yale Law Journal, the
Columbia Law Review, the Northwestern University Law Review, the Virginia
Law Review, and the Minnesota Law Review. |
Transcripts
(Video
Transcriptions: If you would like to take empathic action
and create a transcription of this video, check
the volunteers page. The transcriptions will make it easier for
other viewers to quickly see the content of this video.)
In Defense of Judicial Empathy, - Howard M. Wasserman
"With In Defense of Judicial Empathy, Thomas Colby undertakes the first
comprehensive scholarly treatment and defense of the President’s
arguments and of empathy as an essential and unavoidable component of
good judicial decision-making. And he ties the centrality of empathy to
broader debates over the judicial role.
Colby begins by identifying and
correcting the arguable cause of much of the controversy over the
President’s standard—the confusion between empathy and sympathy. While
empathy is a relatively new word of contested meaning, Colby adopts the
dictionary definition: the “action of understanding, being aware of,
being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts,
and experience of another of either the past or present without having
the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an
objectively explicit manner.” Empathy is the cognitive skill of being
able to see a situation from someone else’s perspective and to
understand how and why someone sees, feels, and acts as they do. That is
fundamentally different than sympathy, through which a person is
affected by and acts in support of the feelings of another. As Colby
puts it, sympathy is feeling for someone; empathy is feeling withsomeone."
Article:
In Defense of Judicial Empathy
by Thomas B. Colby - Professor of Law, The George Washington University
Law School.
This Article is dedicated to my mother, whose empathy is legendary.
-
Introduction
-
I. The “Umpathy” Divide and the Poverty
of Popular Discourse on Judging
-
II. The View of Empathy Among
Conservative Legal Intellectuals
-
III. The Nature of Empathy
-
IV. The Importance of Empathy in
Judging
-
A. The Initial Cut: Empathy in
Judging Means Seeing (and Understanding the Effect of) the Issue
from All Sides
-
B. The Second Cut: The Pervasive
Necessity to Understand the Perspectives of All Sides in
Judging
-
C. The Third Cut: Differences in the
Capacity to Empathize
-
D. The Final Cut: Empathic Blind
Spots
-
V. The Inadequacy of the Non-empathic,
Umpire Judge
-
VI. The Ideal Empathic Judge
-
Conclusion
Notes
-
Introduction
-
I. The “Umpathy” Divide and the Poverty
of Popular Discourse on Judging
-
II. The View of Empathy Among
Conservative Legal Intellectuals
-
III. The Nature of Empathy
-
IV. The Importance of Empathy in
Judging
-
A. The Initial Cut: Empathy in
Judging Means Seeing (and Understanding the Effect of) the Issue
from All Sides
"A judge who exercises the ability to empathize will surely do so
with the poor, the weak, and the little guy. But she will also
empathize with the rich, the powerful, and the big guy. An empathic
judge will understand the perspective of both the innocent man who
was mistakenly detained by the police and the police officer who had
to make a snap judgment when lives appeared to be at risk. She will
understand the perspec-tive of both the aggrieved insured who was
denied coverage for her loss and the skeptical claims adjustor who
was concerned with avoiding fraud and containing costs. She will
understand the perspective of both the dying patient who was
misdiagnosed and the doctor who was rightly concerned with the costs
and risks of ordering additional tests."
-
B. The Second Cut: The Pervasive
Necessity to Understand the Perspectives of All Sides in
Judging
-
1. Constitutional Law
-
Conservatives say: Empathy is only
for one side.
-
Empathy is for all parties of the Case
-
2. Beyond Constitutional Law
[lots of examples of how empathy is used by judges]
-
at least some of the time, a common
law judge will formulate rules and decide cases based on her sense
of what will, on balance, be best for the parties and for society.
-
[
-
3. A Law of Rules?
-
C. The Third Cut: Differences in the
Capacity to Empathize
-
D. The Final Cut: Empathic Blind
Spots
-
V. The Inadequacy of the Non-empathic,
Umpire Judge
-
VI. The Ideal Empathic Judge
-
A. Broad Empathy, Not Narrow Sympathy
-
B. Overcoming Empathic Blind Spots
-
C. Empathy and Politics
-
"Indeed, one might wonder if the
entire national debate about judicial empathy has been nothing more
than an over-blown semantic miscommunication.293 Conservatives have
mis-takenly conflated empathy with sympathy—hardly an unfor-givable
sin, given that the two terms are often used interchangeably in
popular discourse. As a result they have perceived a great rift in
judicial philosophy that is not really there. In fact, everyone
agrees that sympathy is an inappropri-ate basis for judicial
decision making,294 and maybe everyone agrees that empathy, properly
defined, is a desirable quality in a judge. Perhaps we are all on
the same page substantively; we just need to get our terms
straight."
-
D. The Risks of Empathy
-
Conclusion
Notes:
Would be good to interview judges about
the role of empathy in their decision making.
|
