About this project

Methods of social representation in analysis of legal concepts (GA20-10171S) is a current project funded by Czech Grant Agency. It focuses on conceptualization in law and seeks to explore it by means of social representations approach.

• What is social representations approach?

People understand each other while communicating also because they seem to share understanding of what they are communicating about. These shared understandings, or shared ideas, are esseantialy what social psychology understands as „social representations“.

The idea of social representations of concepts was introduced by Serge Moscovici who understood them as a collective elaboration ‘of a social object by the community for the purpose of behaving and communicating’ (Moscovici 1963). They are the result of social construction that performs a symbolic role, representing an object to a group of persons (Wachelke 2012, 730).

Social representations of concepts are built upon central core and periphery, where the core is represented by elements of high consent within a social group, whereas the periphery is flexible and prone to environmental and cultural specifics (Wachelke, 2012, 731).

• How do we use this approach in our project?

Law is a conceptual enterprise. We create and sustain complex abstract and often vague concepts that construct our legal reality. Especially vague legal concepts are those that are meant to be organically interpreted and reinterpreted via practice.

To discover how vague legal concepts are constructed – perceived, understood, used and exploited in practice, an empirical research becomes a necessity. The methods available, both qualitative and quantitative, are abundant: from semi-structured interviews through association evocations to questionnaires.

In this project, we are using a couple of these methods to explore a small number of selected vague legal concepts. Our aim is to explore the capabilities of these methods for otherwise traditional doctrinal legal research. We believe that the social representations approach is capable of bringing new insights especially when it comes to understanding the meaning of vague legal concepts and bridging the gap between legal theory and practice.