Conceptualization of ‘Public Order’ within Czech Legal Style

In this paper, we report the findings of a part of a wider complex research related to social representations approach in understanding vague legal concepts. In the course of our research, we have explored our participants’ understanding of public order in a very similar setting to the one presented in this case. Their understanding seems to suggest that although public order points towards basic values of a given society, some of our participants suggest that it is a concept whose interpretation remains strictly legal, confining the judge to – sometimes incomplete – information provided by formal legal sources or legal doctrine. While such a confinement may result in weak argumentation, we believe it may also be explainable in terms of normativist and formalistic tendencies present in the Czech legal culture.