The element of intuition in legal decision-making

This paper focuses on the elements that influence judges throughout their decision-making process, namely it tries to point out a few pressing questions about judges’ intuition. American legal realists, attempting to disprove certain elements of legal formalism tried to set a light to judges’ practice, claiming that judges are deciding cases on the basis of their beliefs and legal hunching (their intuition) instead of blindly following the legal rules and interpretive doctrines, and using their rationalization to bolster their intuitive decision with the doctrinal principles rather than derive the decision out of them. During the last few decades there were various researches conducted studying the decision-making processes of the judges in connection to their political affiliations, race, education, demographics etc., but very few of those were focused solely on the element of intuition. That being said about the American legal space this paper points out that almost no relevant research exists in the Czech legal background. Thus, the paper emphasizes the importance of (further) studies in this field and introduces a pilot research conducted on selected Czech Supreme Court justices focusing on their decision-making process