The Collective Mind of the Court. Insights from a European Project on Collective Intentionality in Collegial Courts
The Collective Mind of the Court. Insights from a European Project on Collective Intentionality in Collegial Courts

Summary/Abstract: In the labyrinthine corridors of democratic theory and legal practice, there exists a realm seldom charted: the inner workings of collegial courts, where individual judgments dissolve into the elusive ‘we’ of collective authority. This inquiry, conducted under the auspices of the COIN project (The emergence of COllective INtentionality in participatory decision-making processes of the courts), seeks to trace the serpentine paths by which plural intentions coalesce into binding legal norms, revealing law not as a static codex but as a performative instantiation of collective cognition. Through a triangulation of textual exegesis, judicial interviews, and ethnographic observation, the project illuminates the delicate interplay between participatory democracy, collective intentionality, and the normative force of legal entities. Here, courts emerge simultaneously as laboratories and cathedrals of deliberation, spaces where the fragile architecture of shared recognition becomes visible and operative. The present reflection is less a conclusion than a prologue, an invitation to accompany law from its philosophical lexicon to its lived judicial enactment—a realm where the ‘I’ is constantly negotiated into the ‘we’, and where legitimacy is performed rather than proclaimed.

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