Collective Mental Action: Turning Texts into Statutes

Abstract How exactly do we know that a text is a law? This paper argues that purely legalistic explanations are inadequate because they do not explain why certain voting rules possess the authority to alter the statute book. Rejecting the modern tendency to view legislatures as a “they, not an ‘it’,” I critically examine Michael Bratman’s proceduralist theory, which draws on the traditional idea of a single legislative author. Bratman holds that statutes express the legislature’s collective intentions, understood as the outcome of legislators’ shared preferences regarding procedural matters. I argue that Bratman’s approach overemphasizes rational coherence and confers undue power on individual minority legislators. To address these concerns, the paper revises Bratman’s framework to a) incorporate a majoritarian rule of aggregation and, b) conceive of legislation as a mental act involving the formation of a collective policy “will” rather than a collective policy “intention.” This conceptual shift relaxes the rationality threshold for legislative action and aligns Bratman’s framework more closely with the pragmatic realities of legislative assemblies.