Law has its place even in times of chaos, agree lawyers from four countries at a Znojmo conference

In mid-June, seventy legal theorists from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, and Hungary met in Znojmo to discuss the metamorphoses of law in Central Europe. The biennial conference, held for the ninth time, was organized by the Department of Legal Theory at the UWB Law Faculty.

What is the role of law in times of chaos? This was the unifying theme of the ninth conference, focused on the metamorphoses of law. The three dozen papers presented covered not only legal theory but also the judiciary, public administration, local government, and labor law. The authors reached a consensus: "Even in times of chaos, the law must be a clear voice, even if it is a voice crying in the wilderness. It is the irreplaceable task of legal theory and jurisprudence to create the conditions for this."

Aleš Gerloch from Charles University described current disputes over the scope of the President's powers as interpretive conflicts stemming from the law's inherent lack of clarity. Ivan Halász from the Academy of Sciences followed up by taking a historical perspective on the constitution as an element that can both establish order and deepen chaos. Rudolf Kasinec from Comenius University in Bratislava addressed a timely yet timeless topic: how to approach the (anti-)woke discourse and, specifically, how (and whether) to defend against it when it formally threatens academic freedom. Olga Rosenkranzová from Palacký University explored posthumanism in law, concluding that morphological freedom—manifested through various interventions in the human body—leads to the commodification of the body (treating it as a mere tool to achieve goals without considering the person's true needs). She asked: "Where is Patočka’s care for the soul and the spirituality of the spirit? Is this instrumentalization not a loss of dignity?"

Beyond purely theoretical and philosophical topics, participants also addressed matters closer to practice. Lucia Berdisová from Masaryk University provided an extensive analysis of case law on judges' freedom of expression. She concluded that there may be no "meaningfully consistent interpretation of what constitutes a threat to democracy and the rule of law" that would justify abandoning judicial restraint. She illustrated this by noting that the relevant thesis from the London Declaration is translated in exactly the opposite way on the Slovak Judicial Council's website. Michal Jesenko and Martina Kantorová from the University of Košice approached the same topic from a different angle, describing local self-government as a fundamental pillar of democracy and the rule of law.

The conference was preceded by a one-day meeting of the departments of legal theory from public universities in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Members focused on the challenges facing legal theory and its instruction in the context of ongoing study program reaccreditations. The structure of teaching varies significantly across the seven participating schools, with no two models being identical. Experts agreed that legal theory remains a crucial part of training future lawyers, serving as a necessary introduction to the field and its methodology. At the end of the meeting, the lecturers presented their latest academic publications; František Cvrček from the UWB Faculty of Law introduced his comprehensive analytical monograph, Metamorphoses of the Czech Legal Order from 1918 to 2022.