Current Justices and Court Officials

vypis soudci

prof. JUDr. PhDr. Jan Wintr, Ph.D.

Justice (since 5 June 2023)

prof. JUDr. PhDr. Jan Wintr Ph.D.

Jan Wintr (*1978) was born in Prague, where he has spent most of his life. After graduating from the mathematics class of what is now the Christian Doppler Gymnasium, he studied law at the Faculty of Law of Charles University (1996–2001) and history and political science at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University (1996–2004). He continued his doctoral studies at the Faculty of Law of Charles University (2001–2006). In 2002–2003, he completed a one-year study stay at the University of Munich.

Since 2004, he has held an academic post at the Faculty of Law of Charles University, namely at the Department of Theory of Law and Legal Doctrines, where he was appointed associate professor (docent) in 2014 and professor in 2021. He has always appreciated being part of the community of students and teachers at the Charles University and especially its law faculty. In his academic career, he has completed study and research stays in Frankfurt am Main, Heidelberg, Munich, Krakow, Berlin and Vienna, including a five-month internship at the Commission for the History of Parliamentarianism and Political Parties at the German Bundestag. Furthermore, he took active part in numerous international conferences and seminars. He was a member of the Academic Senate of Charles University and the President of the Academic Senate of the Faculty of Law of Charles University. To this day, he is a member of the scientific councils of law faculties in Prague and Olomouc and serves on the editorial board of the journal Právník (The Lawyer). He was an external lecturer at the Faculty of Social Sciences of Charles University and he teaches at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University.

He wrote a textbook called Principy českého ústavního práva, 6. vydání, 2023 (Principles of Czech Constitutional Law, 6th edition, 2023), in which he tries to portray constitutional law as a field where the conflicting principles of the democratic, liberal, social, legal and constitutional state collide, seeking to find interpretations that would enable us to understand and explain our constitutional system as a meaningful, functional whole. He has authored four monographs: Metody a zásady interpretace práva, 2. vydání, 2019 (Methods and Principles of Legal Interpretation, 2nd edition, 2019); Česká parlamentní kultura, 2010 (Czech Parliamentary Culture, 2010); Proměny parlamentní kultury, 2021 (The Transformation of Parliamentary Culture, 2021); and Říše principů. Obecné a odvětvové principy současného českého práva, 2006 (The Empire of Principles. General and Sectoral Principles of Contemporary Czech Law, 2006), for which he won the Bolzano Prize and the Antonín Randa Medal. He also contributed to the commentary on the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms in the authors’ collective led by Eliška Wagnerová and has written more than one hundred other texts in the field of legal theory, constitutional law, legal history and political science. He is the co-editor of numerous scholarly books, including twenty-five collections of student papers from seminars on constitutional law. He also shares his opinions on constitutional law issues in the daily press and other mass media.

He was a member of the Government Legislative Council, the Committee for LGBTI+ Rights of the Government Human Rights Council and the Ethics Committee of Czech Radio; in 2014–2015, he was the Chairman of the Czech News Agency Council. In 2019, he became a Secretary of the Standing Commission of the Chamber of Deputies on the Constitution of the Czech Republic.

He spends his free time reading, playing tennis or walking in the Czech countryside.

On 5 June 2023, the President of the Czech Republic appointed him as a Justice of the Constitutional Court.

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