Western Law Hosts Book Manuscript Workshop on Tort Law and Emotions
August 05, 2026
On June 5, 2026, Western Law hosted a workshop on a draft book manuscript written by Professor Zoë Sinel (Western Law). The book is titled Just Feelings: A Tort Law Theory of Emotion.
The workshop was organized by Professors Joanna Langille and Jason Neyers, and featured comments on Professor Sinel’s book from leading private law scholars, including Professors Robert Stevens (Oxford), Nicolas Cornell (Michigan), Christopher Essert (Toronto), Jennifer Nadler (Osgoode), Stephen Bero (SFU), and Erika Chamberlain (Western).
Professor Sinel’s book examines what several key human emotions — fear, distress, spite, grief, love, pain, and regret — mean in tort law. Its central argument is that, for emotions to form the bases of tort law's rights, obligations, and remedies, they must be understood from the perspective of tort law itself. This is a perspective that must eschew a conception of emotions as mere feelings and insist on an understanding that preserves the parties' juridical equality. In its offering of a strictly juridical account of emotions, the book challenges some contemporary neuroscientific theories of emotions as well as recent social shifts in our treatment and responses to the emotional states of others.
