Alessandra Minissale

Alessandra Minissale holds a double PhD in Sociology and Legal Studies. She is the Principal investigator of the project Justice Outside the Court. An Ethnography of Emotions in Commercial Mediation, funded by the Swedish Research Council, which focuses on emotions' role in commercial disputes in Italy and England. The project has also been granted the SYLFF - The Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund. In Italy, she conducts her research at the Institute of Legal Informatics and Judicial Systems-National Research Council of Italy (Bologna), where she is an associate researcher.

Previously, her research focused on emotions, narrative and decision-making in court, as part of the international ERC-Project Justemotions.

Prior to her PhD, Alessandra graduated in Law (2016), cum laude, and worked at Bologna University as Teaching Assistant in Civil Procedural Law. She also worked as a trainee lawyer and judge's assistant. 

She was a visiting researcher at the Centre of Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford (2023) and at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies of Law (CIS) - University of Copenhagen (2024).

Alessandra is an active member of the Law and Society Association and she is one of the members of the Board of the Research Network 11-Sociology of emotions, of the European Sociological Association.

In 2022, Alessandra’s article titled “Scrutinizing Gut Feelings: Emotional Reflexive Practices in Italian Courts” unanimously received the Best Paper Award at the European Sociological Association Midterm Conference in Hamburg.

Selection of publications:

Beyond a reasonable doubt: the emotive-cognitive evaluation of intent and credibility, International Journal of Law in context, 2025, 21(4): 691-710.

Artificial intelligence and real decisions: predictive systems and generative AI vs. emotive-cognitive legal deliberations, Frontiers in Sociology, 2024(9), 1-11. 

Scrutinising gut feelings: emotional reflexive practices in Italian courts, in Emotions and Society 2024, 6(1): 7-25.

(Dis)passionate law stories: the emotional processes of encoding narratives in court, in Jorunal of Law and Society 2022, 49(2):245-262.