Kathy Mack, an emeritus professor at Flinders Law School in southern Australia, has talked to scads of judges as part of the school's broader research project focusing on the country's judiciary. A portion of that research has homed in on how judges understand the role of emotions in their work.

"Judges are human. Judges are people and so they're going to experience and display emotion. It's inevitable," said Mack yesterday in a conversation with retired Minnesota District Court Judge Kevin Burke during a program on judges and emotion sponsored by the Berkeley Judicial Institute yesterday afternoon. But Mack cautioned that emotions—both when it comes to a judge's inward state and outward demeanor—have the potential to be inconsistent with the impartiality that's core to a judge's work.