The Legal Scholarship Funding System in the Czech Republic: An Accurate Reflection of Research Quality or an (Ineffective) Means of Polarizing the Academic Legal Community?

DOI: https://doi.org/10.71372/QPAI7935

Keywords: evaluation and funding of legal scholarship, bibliometrics, peer review, Czech M2017+ evaluation, Czech law faculties

Abstract: The issue of funding legal scholarship is perhaps one of the most divisive elements within the Czech legal academic community. The article critically analyzes the funding system and its functioning at the national, university, and faculty levels, with primary attention devoted to institutional funding through the so-called DKRVO. The sample includes all four Czech law faculties and their parent universities, with the analysis based mainly on internal normative documents and available or author-processed data. The text demonstrates that despite various reforms, the allocation of research funds at all levels remains highly inertial and path-dependent. At both the national and university levels, the dominant portion of DKRVO is distributed according to historical fix, with only a smaller part tied to current performances. The benefits of this approach for legal scholarship (law faculties) are questionable, and it certainly does not remedy the long-term underfunding of social sciences and humanities compared to natural sciences. At the faculty level, managements introduce complex evaluation systems that assign a certain number of points to different types of publications according to internal priorities; these point totals are subsequently used to assess performance and determine academic remuneration. Although there is no single ideal evaluation and funding system satisfying everyone, the article offers several recommendations that may help to improve the current situation.

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