Law and Society Lab
Who we are?
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.
Currently, the Law and Society Lab is formed by researchers from the Department of Legal Theory of the Faculty of Law of MU and INPSY FSS MU.
Informal Head of the Lab: Terezie Smejkalová
Faculty of Law MU Faculty of Social Sciences MU Markéta Štěpáníková Jan Šerek Dennis Wassouf Petr Palíšek Ondřej Glogar Tomáš Havlíček Hynek Vrána What we do?
- Research connections - Legal theorists, psychologists or linguists are often interested in similar research topics, but do not always have access to platforms to share their results. The aim of the Law and Society Lab is to provide a platform for this type of networking and thus enable the development of joint project and research activities.
- Joint presentation of research results - We want to show the benefits of such networking also by working on joint popularisation of the results of our, albeit independent, research.
- Thematic consultation hub for students and graduate students - Are you a student of a MUNI Law School and your topic has a psychological or sociological overlap? Are you a student of MUNI Faculty of Social Studies and you are interested in legal topics? Feel free to contact any of us, we will be happy to help!
- Teaching connections
- Organisation of workshops
Upcoming activities
The Lab kicks off its activities this autumn with two events. The workshop, entitled "Kafka Reconfigured: Law, Literature, Politics", aims to decentralize attention from Kafka's aesthetics of gloom to positive and hopeful thinking about law, authority and literature in the context of the 100th anniversary of Kafka's death. With the participation of leading literary scholars and legal philosophers, we will seek to answer the significance of Kafka for contemporary understandings of the social and cultural role of law. The workshop will take place on 22 November at the Masaryk University Faculty of Law.
The second event, organised in collaboration with colleagues from the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, entitled "Law, Identity and Normality", is part of a series of workshops with the collective title "Peripheries". The concept of the periphery will serve as an epistemic jump-off point for exploring questions of the construction of normality and the zones of exclusion in which law and legal institutions may participate. The topics to be discussed will be corporeality, queerness, gender and their legal connotations, which will be addressed from the trans-disciplinary perspectives of psychology, philosophy and sociology. The event will take place on 13 December, at the Masaryk University Faculty of Law.