Horák, Filip

E-mail: horakfil@prf.cuni.cz

Phone number:  +420 221 005 352

Filip Horák, is a talented interdisciplinary researcher specialising in constitutional law, human rights and empirical legal research. Although he finished his PhD in 2022, he has already published 9 WoS articles, 8 of them in the Q2, Q1 or even D1 journals. His work has been cited 21 times in WoS (h-index 3), 45 times in Scopus (h-index 4) a 156 times in Google Scholar (h-index 8). He is also experienced in creating and managing successful teams from the very beginning of the research to successful WoS publications (e.g., Horák, Lacko & Klocek, 2021; Horák et al., 2023). He participated in several national and international research collaborations (e.g., SYRI; Gender Audits Forecasting Collaboration) and worked on several national grant projects (e.g., GAČR č. 20-05069S; TAČR č. TL04000308).

In his relatively brief career, he has worked with success on four key research areas: (1) the research of proportionality and its limits, i.e., the situations in which the proportionality cannot be applied or operates in a different than standard way, (2) interdisciplinary research of legal consciousness, (3) emergency governance in the Czech Republic during the Covid-19 pandemic, and (4) proportionality in elections and potential methods of measuring proportionality. The most significant and influential findings and outcomes from his research activities are the following:

(1) In the first research area, among his most recent work can be highlighted (a) the research into axiomatic arguments before the courts which either deform or even eliminate the proportional argumentation, (b) the analysis of paradoxes of proportionality in mandatory vaccination cases, and (c) the precautionary application of proportionality in the emergencies. The findings of the research were (besides the less important publications) published in the highly respected European Journal of Constitutional Law (Q1, two articles), Journal of Medical Ethics (D1), and also in two monographs.

(2) For the second research area, he and his colleagues published an influential systematic literature review on legal consciousness. The review offered a new analytical definition of the construct and included all its hitherto separately studied and understood dimensions. They also discovered the connection between legal consciousness and the related constructs of the legitimacy of law and rule of law. This allowed them to triangulate various approaches to the rule of law and offer a significantly improved measurement method. Their findings were (among others) published in two influential impacted journals – Anuario de Psicología Jurídica/Annual Review of Legal Psychology (Q2) and The Hague Journal on the Rule of Law (Q1).

(3) For the third research area, he and his colleagues developed a robust theoretical background for emergency governance in the Czech Republic and critically reflected on the various emergency measures used by the Czech authorities to fight against the Covid-19 pandemic. In addition to other monograph and article publications, they published one of the first articles (if not the first) which analysed the emergency measures under the Czech Public Health Protection Act; the article was referred to by the Constitutional Court in its pandemic case law. Furthermore, their recent outcomes measuring the perceived legitimacy of the anti-pandemic measures in Germany, the Czech Republic and Slovakia were published in Psychology, Public Policy, and Law (Q2).

(4) Finally, regarding the fourth research area, he has proposed a novel approach in assessing election proportionality based on the relative change between actual and ideally proportionate election results. He then further developed (and complemented with an analysis of the distribution of overall disproportionality between individual parties and violation of the logical sequence of an election result) and applied this approach in a comparative study of the three electoral formulae used in the Czech electoral environment. The general approach was published in the European Journal of Constitutional Law (Q1) and an extension and application in Sociologický časopis/Czech Sociological Review (Q4).