Prague Constitutional Seminar Series: Barbara Havelková

The Department of Constitutional Law invites you to a seminar in the recently launched Prague Constitutional Seminar Series:

Barbara Havelková (Oxford University) will present her draft paper, The Non-Constitutionalization and Avoidant Constitutionalization of Gender in Czechia and Slovakia.

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The seminar will take place on Wednesday, April 9, at 17:00 in Room 117.

The event will be held in Czech.

Everyone is warmly welcome!

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Bio

Barbara Havelková is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford, and a Tutorial Fellow in Law at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. She holds degrees from the Faculty of Law, Charles University in Prague (Mgr. 2004, JUDr. 2005), the Europa-Institut at Saarland University (LL.M. 2008), and the University of Oxford (MSt 2010, DPhil 2013). As a Fulbright-Masaryk Program scholar, she visited the law schools of Harvard University and the University of Michigan, and as an Emile Noël Fellow, she conducted research at the NYU School of Law.

Her research focuses on gender and law, feminist legal studies, anti-discrimination law, European and constitutional law, and the law of post-socialist transformation. She is the author of Gender Equality in Law: Uncovering the Legacies of Czech State Socialism (Hart/Bloomsbury, 2017) and co-editor and co-author of Anti-Discrimination Law in Civil Law Jurisdictions (Oxford University Press, 2019).

She is also active as an expert and academic in the Czech Republic. From 2014 to 2017, she served as an advisor to Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka. In Czech, she is the author of Rovnost v odměňování žen a mužů (Equal Pay for Women and Men) (Auditorium, 2010), co-author of the Commentary on the Anti-Discrimination Act (C.H. Beck, 2010 and 2016), and co-editor and contributing author of Co s prostitucí? Veřejné politiky a práva osob v prostituci (What to Do About Prostitution? Public Policies and the Rights of Persons in Prostitution) (SLON, 2014) and Mužské právo (Men’s Law) (Wolters Kluwer, 2020 and 2025, in press).

Abstract

Has constitutional law provided a meaningful space for contestations of patriarchy in Czechia and Slovakia? Only to a limited extent. Both the Czech and the Slovak Constitutional Courts are not unerringly able to recognize, understand, critically reflect on, and appropriately respond to gender-based injustices, nor are they particularly willing to adjudicate on difficult and socially and politically controversial gender questions. The Courts use two techniques to avoid full decisions on merit: ‘non-constitutionalization’ – notably through limitations on standing (in Slovakia) - and ‘avoidant constitutionalization’ – through dismissal of cases as ‘manifestly unfounded’, choice of ratio, in some cases outsized deference to the legislature (in Czechia), and an institutionally pragmatic ‘middle-ground’ decision-making (in Slovakia).