Law and Society Lab

The Law and Society Lab is an informal group of researchers (currently primarily affiliated with the Department of Legal Theory at MU Law School and The Psychology Research Institute at MU Faculty of Social Studies), who share an interest in studying law in its social embeddedness. We are convinced that reducing law to a „set of legal rules” narrows the scope of knowledge and understanding of how law actually performs in society. Thus, our primary goal is to create a platform for presenting and sharing the results of our research concerning law as a social phenomenon that ought to be approached from a critical-psychological and sociological perspective.

We subscribe to the current trends in international legal theory - especially critical realism and methodological naturalism - though we avoid accepting them uncritically.

Indeed, we believe that law should be a responsible and considerate instrument for the care of society. This requires a deep understanding of the workings of individuals, groups and the society as a whole that constructs law in the communicative processes.

Our motivation is to investigate socio-legal phenomena and law as a distinct phenomenon. And this, in our view, can only be done in inter- or multi-disciplinary way.

This does not purport us completely rejecting the traditional of Czech variety of legal normativism paradigm; after all, this is probably the prevailing conceptualisation of law in the Czech legal culture. However, we would like to stress that it is only one of many paradigms that the heterodoxy of legal studies offer, and as such it has its weaknesses. For it neglects people as actors and implementers of law, their values and representations, attitudes, cognitive processes, errors, and also emotions. Therefore, we want to actively work with other conceptualisations of law in our research and participate in the restructuring of the Czech legal discourse.

The Law and Society Lab is a follow-up project to the already completed project The Use of Social Representation Methods in the Analysis of Legal Concepts funded by the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic (GA20-10171S). The results of this project, including links to relevant publications, are available here.

Programme Chair

Terezie Smejkalová
terezie.smejkalova@law.muni.cz
Department of Legal Theory
Masaryk University, Czech Republic

Members of the Organizing Committee

Tomáš Havlíček
tomas.havlicek@law.muni.cz
Institute of Law and Technology
Masaryk University, Czech Republic

Markéta Štěpáníková
marketa.stepanikova@law.muni.cz
Department of Legal Theory
Masaryk University, Czech Republic

Hynek Vrána
383760@mail.muni.cz
Department of Legal Theory
Masaryk University, Czech Republic

Dennis Wassouf
dennis.wassouf@law.muni.cz
Department of Legal Theory
Masaryk University, Czech Republic