Exploring conceptual bias in legal regulation

This paper starts from a simple and an almost self-evident premise that concepts known from our everyday lives entail certain understandings, associations, or in linguistic terms, entailments, that in effect colour legal regulation. Our paper does not seek to prove such a claim, nor does it intend to show examples of such colouring. It intends to build on a fact that in legal research such premises are often taken for granted and that they are not being contested. But to contest such a premise, one would need to go far beyond the boundaries of traditional legal academic writing and venture into methods provided by other (social) sciences. This paper shall explore the methods available to prove such a claim and assesses their practical availability to a legal scholar with traditional Czech education. Furthermore, it will discuss the related issues of whether proving the initial premise might still be considered to fall within the realm of legal theory and whether the universities should prepare future legal scholars for the need to venture far beyond the traditional legal theory or legal philosophy.