About us

Francesco Contini is a senior researcher at the Research Institute on Judicial System of the National Research Council of Italy, where he coordinates the research area “Quality and assessment of justice systems.” He studies the institutional transformations of European judiciaries with a special focus on procedural justice, performance evaluation and quality development, as well as e-justice. He has been PI in different projects such as “Handle with Care: assessing and designing methods for evaluation and development of the quality of justice” and "Building Interoperability for European Civil Proceedings Online". Francesco has written various articles and books on such topics, among which “Judicial Evaluation” with Richard Mohr (VDM 2008), ‘ICT and innovation in the public sector’ (Palgrave 2009) and “The Circulation of Agency in e-Justice” (Springer 2014) both edited with Giovan Francesco Lanzara. He has ongoing collaborations with the COE, UNODC, IADB to judicial reform programs. Selected publications are available here.

Alessandra Minissale is a PhD candidate in sociology at the Department of Sociology, Uppsala University, since October 2018.Alessandra graduated in law and worked at the Faculty of Law - Alma mater Studiorum (University of Bologna, Italy) as Assistant in Civil Procedural Law. Alessandra research focus on emotions and decision-making in court, as part of the international ERC-Project Justemotions, where she will carry out the fieldwork in Italy. Alongside with sociology of emotions and decision-making, her research interests include narrative analysis, interactions and legal reasoning.

Cecilia Nordquist is a PhD candidate in sociology at the Department of Sociology, Uppsala University since September 2018. Cecilia’s research focuses on emotions and decision-making in court, as part of the international project JUSTEMOTIONS, where she will carry out the fieldwork in Scotland. Alongside with sociology of emotions and decision-making, her research interests include objectivity, discourse, symbolic interactionism, qualitative methods and gender studies. She completed her master’s degree at Gothenburg University.

Susan A. Bandes is a scholar in the areas of criminal procedure and civil rights, and a pioneer in the interdisciplinary study of the role of emotion in law. She is Centennial Professor of Law Emeritus at DePaul University in Chicago. She has written more than 70 articles, which appear in the Yale, Stanford, University of Chicago, Michigan and Southern California law reviews, as well as interdisciplinary journals like Law and Social Inquiry, the Annual Review of Law and Social Science, and the Law and Society Review. Her book The Passions of Law was published by NYU Press in 2000. She is a member of the American Law Institute (and the members consultative group on policing practices), a fellow of the American Bar Foundation, and the founder of the Law and Society Association’s Collaborative Research Network on Law and Emotion. Her pro bono activities include acting as co-reporter for the Constitution Project’s bipartisan Death Penalty Initiative, which produced the report Mandatory Justice: Eighteen Reforms to the Death Penalty, and serving on the advisory board to the Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justices study of the criminal justice system in Cook County, IL.

Åsa Wettergren is Professor of Sociology at the Departmentof Sociology and Work Science, University of Gothenburg. Wettergren is an internationally recognized scholar in the Sociology of emotions, focusing on emotions in migration, social movements (the environmental movement), and in Law. Since 2012 she is heading in a series of research projects about emotions in the Swedish legal system together with Stina Bergman Blix. Wettergren is a chief editor of the scientific journal Emotions and Society and one of the founders of the European Sociological Associations’ Research Network 11, Sociology of Emotions.