David Lemmings is Professor of History at The University of Adelaide and a Chief Investigator with the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. He has published extensively on the socio-cultural history of law and the legal professions in eighteenth-century Britain. He is the author of Law and Government in England during the Long Eighteenth Century: From Consent to Command (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 2015); and the editor of Crime, Courtrooms and the Public Sphere in Britain, 1700–1850 (Ashgate, 2012); and (with Ann Brooks), Emotions and Social Change: Historical and Sociological Perspectives (Routledge, 2014, 2016). This paper – ‘Emotions, Power and Popular Opinion about the Administration of Justice: The English Experience, from Coke’s “Artificial Reason” to the Sensibility of “True Crime Stories”’ – was delivered as a keynote address at a conference on ‘Powerful Emotions / Emotions and Power’ at the University of York in June 2017. An expanded version of this paper has been published in Emotions: History, Culture, Society 1.1 (2017).