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The COIN Project is pleased to announce the publication of The Judicial We: Collective Intentionality in Collegial Adjudication, a new book by Marco Mazzocca, Principal Investigator of the COIN Project.

Published by ŠafárikPress – Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, the volume brings together the theoretical and empirical strands developed throughout the COIN research project and explores a deceptively simple question: when a collegial court decides, who exactly is the “we” to whom the decision is attributed?

Legal language routinely speaks of the Court deciding, reasoning, finding, or holding. Yet collegial judgments are produced by several individual judges, each bringing their own perspectives, arguments, and assessments to the deliberative process. The Judicial We investigates how these individual standpoints may be transformed into a single institutional decision and asks what role collective intentionality plays in that transformation.

The book develops this inquiry progressively across three interconnected parts.

It begins with questions of legal ontology and judicial reasoning, examining how courts reconstruct events, identify legally relevant facts, and attribute legal status. From there, the analysis moves from the individual judge to the institutional constraints within which judicial power is exercised.

The second part turns directly to collegial decision-making. It examines the difference between simply aggregating individual votes and genuinely participating in the construction of a shared decision, before addressing the central theoretical problem of collective intentionality and the possibility of understanding the court as a collective agent.

The final part brings these conceptual questions into contact with judicial practice. Drawing on the empirical research conducted within the COIN Project, it presents a qualitative research design centred on collegial courts and discusses preliminary findings emerging from nineteen semi-structured interviews with judges in Italy and Slovakia. Particular attention is devoted to deliberative practices, unanimity, trust, the role of the rapporteur, local judicial cultures, and the ways in which judges themselves understand the relationship between their individual perspectives and the institutional voice of the court.

Rather than offering a closed theory of collective adjudication, the book traces a path from a fundamental ontological question — what exists? — through the legal question — what does this count as? — to the specifically judicial question of who has the authority to make such determinations. In the context of a collegial court, this ultimately becomes the question at the heart of the COIN Project:

When the Court says “we decide”, what exists — and who is the “we”?

The Judicial We: Collective Intentionality in Collegial Adjudication is published as an open-access e-book and can be downloaded free of charge through ŠafárikPress / UniBook.

Download the book:
https://doi.org/10.33542/TJW-0542-9

Marco Mazzocca, The Judicial We: Collective Intentionality in Collegial Adjudication, Košice: ŠafárikPress, 2026. ISBN 978-80-574-0542-9.