Lay Participation in Danish Crime Trials: On the Interaction between Lay and Professional Judges during Deliberation

While there is abundant research on common law jury systems, we know less about lay participation in civil law crime trials, often called ‘mixed courts’ or alternately ‘mixed tribunals'. Here, a professional judge and a number of lay judges deliberate together on the issues of guilt and sentencing. This joint deliberation has naturally led both public opinion and research to focus on power relations such as lay judges’ dependence on the professional judges. Based on an ethnographic study of deliberation processes, the present article offers a different perspective on lay judges’ contribution and argues that their decision making rests on a hybrid construction of knowledge in the continuous interaction between the professional judge and lay participants during deliberation. The analysis of this decision‐making process contributes to our understanding of how ordinary people selected for this civic duty create knowledge about justice.