Martha Minow discusses the categorical nature of legal reasoning in Making All the Difference: Inclusion and Exclusion in American Law. Reasoning in the law often follows the simple pattern of a yes/no question. If yes, then the next set of questions follows from that. If no, a different set of questions follows.

For example, is there an affirmative duty to save a drowning person? The law's first response is NO. Legal reasoning then proceeds from that original no to more specialized cases of the general black letter law. Is a special duty owed to the drowning person? Because one has a special relationship, parent, teacher, to the child? Or because one has given the person cause to rely on some special authority or offer of help or protection? The police in some situations, a university placing students abroad, etc.

As Minow points out, categorical thinking operates on many unstated assumptions of difference and privilege. Essay on unstated assumptions
Some of those assumptions of privilege are dealt with in Chapter 18 of Images of Color.

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Affect enters into this picture because the catergorical pattern of reasoning often fails to tell the story of the relationships, the rights, the needs. We'll review some of Minow's stories. But primarily legal entanglements happen to real people whose lives tell real stories. We need to recognize that sometimes the stories are essential to provide a means of dealing with that affect.

Our first exercise on theory/policy/practice will illustrate where affect comes in.

Notes on Hall, affect levels related to informal, formal, technical. Parallels in legal system.

Unstated assumptions related to affect levels.

Primary answer to unstated assumptions is to bring them to awareness level.

Their role in public discourse - the importance of distancing ourselves to a technical level, and the danger of doing so to such an extent that we fail to hear in good faith and process the informal. (And here is where we fit in aesthetics as a way of experiencing truth which we may not be able to articulate, but which we may still need to take into account.