Public Law
Our staff´s research activities in the field of public law span a wide range of issues. To highlight the subtopics where we especially reach an international excellence, let´s mention primarily our studies in the Human Rights Law covering the both European human rights systems, the one of the Council of Europe and the one of the European Union, and focusing the dynamics of rights reflected in their development and interpretation. Within the field of Constitutional Law and Science, our researchers have carried out analytical and comparative work in constitutional principles, division of powers and functioning of Constitutional Courts within a broad European view, with a special and deeper attention paid to the Visegrad countries because they all share a common experience of the transition from the communist regime to a democratic one; exploring of how their constitutional practice has developed to similarity in some issues but divergence in others, is enriching for all of them. In the field of the Consumer Protection Law, the main attention is paid to the developing EU legislation in the domain of the collective redress and injunctions and their reflections in national laws. The research in the collective redress area has shown fruitful results especially thanks to our recent project "Progress in collective redress mechanisms in environmental and consumer mass harm situations", supported by the International Visegrad Fund. The project has discovered interesting intersections of the consumer and environmental protection. In Environmental Law, there have been several topics analysed besides the mentioned collective redress, primarily the interlinkages between the environmental protection and human rights have been analysed, including both substantive and procedural branches of them (the emerging right to environment and the procedural environmental rights); another part of the environmental law study has concentrated on the animal protection law that had been strongly under-theorized in the Czech Republic. Most recently, out focus has been turning to Climate Law. Thanks to having received a Lumina quaeruntur academic award for her climate law project, Hana Müllerová has launched her new research team to develop this law discipline from 2020. You can visit the website of the Centre for Climate Law and Sustainability Studies (CLASS) here.
In addition to the internationally highlighted domains, there are also issues that are of a top national importance and crucial from the domestic doctrine point of view. It also counts to the mission of the Institute to contribute meaningfully to their resolution. Here, our researchers have been addressing, for instance, legal aspects of the public administration reform in the Czech Republic; impacts of international law on the Czech legal system after the Constitutional amendment integrating certain types of international agreements in the Czech legal order; and the consequences of the new Czech Civil code of 2012 on various fields of law and practice.
Finally, the public law researchers of the Institute also contribute to communicating their legal science topics to the general public and cooperate in an interdisciplinary way. Several of them are involved in the ‘Strategy AV21’ interdisciplinary programmes that are focused to explain the science to the society, e.g. Natural Hazards Programme, r Diversity of Life and Health of Ecosystems Programme, and Water for Life Programme.