Zuzana Vikarská

Zuzi works as an assistant professor at Masaryk University. She teaches and conducts research in the area of constitutional law, human rights, and European law. Zuzi has studied law in Prague, Leuven, and Oxford, and has written her PhD thesis about whether the ECtHR and the CJEU are political actors. The answer is: yes, they are, and given how they have been designed, they cannot be unpolitical. Next to this, Zuzi has also worked on the topic of National identity in the EU (MPhil 2018) which has kept her busy ever since, including in her ongoing DPhil studies at Oxford University, Harris Manchester College.

DialogUE came up as a product of long-term frustration: as an EU law scholar, you can know the ECJ’s case law really well but it is close to impossible to find out how the cases actually turned out in the dispute before the national courts. For important cases, Zuzi did the ‘detective work’, mainly consisting of getting in touch with her colleagues from various Member States and asking them to look up the follow-up cases and write up a very short summary. Similarly, she often responded to similar requests from her international colleagues.

This is how the DialogUE project came into existence. Zuzi and her team will now spend three years studying all the references submitted to the ECJ by Czech and Slovak courts. The aim is to analyse the existing judicial practice, to understand patterns, to suggest any possibilities for improvement to various stakeholders, and to inform the international community of legal academics and practitioners about the final outcomes of the cases in the national courts.

Natálie Dřínovská

Naty is a a PhD candidate in constitutional law at Masaryk University and a law clerk at the Supreme Administrative Court of the Czech Republic. She has always been interested in topics somewhere between constitutional law and EU law. In her PhD thesis, she focuses on defence mechanisms (as she calls them) of Member States against EU law. The goal is to find out 1) what are the intentions of Member States when they do not want to apply EU law on their territory; 2) what exactly are the mechanisms they can use; and 3) which branch of state power has each of these mechanisms at its disposal.

In DialogUE project, she will focus on the decisions of Czech and Slovak apex courts. Are there differences between the approach of Supreme Administrative Court and Supreme Court? If so, why are there such differences? How do the apex courts stand in regards of quality of the preliminary references? These are just some of the question Natálie will try to find answers to. Natálie is also interested in finding out if Czech and Slovak courts try to question the validity of EU law or to quash its applicability in any other way. At the beginning of 2022, the ECJ delivered its judgment in case C-181/20, VYSOČINA WIND, and partially annulled a Directive. The Supreme Court of the Czech Republic however only asked about interpretation and hesitated to contest its validity. Do the courts have any other option than the reference on validity of an EU act? Is that something that can be seen in the phrasing of preliminary reference? And how does the ECJ react to such phrasing?

Marek Pivoda

Marek is an MPhil in Law candidate at the University of Oxford, Harris Manchester College (under the supervision of Sanja Bogojevic). He also pursues his PhD at Masaryk University, Department of Constitutional Law and Political Science (under the supervision of Robert Zbiral). Marek’s primary research interests include EU law, European Constitutionalism, Courts and Judges, Algorithmic Discrimination, and Human Rights more broadly. His current MPhil project concerns the topic of national courts’ treatment of the ECJ’s precedents; the PhD thesis then focuses on the connection between domestic courts’ discretion and the articulation of the ECJ’s precedents.

In the past, Marek was awarded an individual grant by the Masaryk University Internal Grant Agency and he also took part in the Horizon 2020 project InDivEU (Integrating Diversity in the European Union). Recently, he visited the Maastricht Centre for European Law.In DialogUE, Marek will be working on two main papers – the first one aims to find out more about the influence of national judicial hierarchy on the development on the EU law doctrine; the second one then tries to examine why the ECJ answers some preliminary questions more vaguely and ambiguously then others.

Filip Vlček

Filip works as a legal assistant at the General Court of the European Union. He holds a degree in law from Masaryk University (2019) and the University of Oxford (2021). Currently, Filip pursues his PhD at the Department of International and European Law at Masaryk University.

His main fields of interest include EU law and conflict of laws.

In DialogUE, Filip will primarily focus on the impact the content of the request for a preliminary ruling has on the reply from the Court of Justice.

Barbora Budinská

Barbora is a PhD candidate at the Leiden Law School’s Europa Institute (The Netherlands). She holds law degrees from the Humboldt University in Berlin and Leiden University and is a member of the Young Researchers Group of the European Banking Institute. In her doctoral thesis, Barbora analyses the review of national law by the Court of Justice within the framework of European banking supervision and its impact on the principle of EU law autonomy.

As an independent international partner of the DialogUE project, Barbora will focus on writing two papers: in one, she will conduct a substantive analysis of preliminary rulings from Czech and Slovak courts involving national procedural and administrative rules with the aim to develop criteria for measuring the scope of autonomy the Member States retain when implementing EU law. Second, together with Zuzi, she will collect and analyse data from preliminary rulings to study the (non-)compliance of the last instance courts with their duty stemming from the CILFIT ruling and the fair trial guarantee enshrined in national constitutions and the European Convention on Human Rights.

Michal Kovalčík

Michal is an undergraduate student of law and political science at Masaryk University in Brno. During his studies, he has fallen in love with constitutional law, EU law, and international law. Therefore, his initial works focus on the role of courts at the domestic as well as European level. In the DialogUE project, he will assist senior colleagues with their analysis and pursue findings overlapping with his to-be diploma thesis that will compare the role of lower courts in the proceeding according to Article 267 TFEU and in quite a similar system according to Article 95 of the Czech Constitution.

Terézia Lazarová

Terka is completing her Master of Laws degree at Masaryk University. She forms part of the European Human Rights Protection section within the Czech Centre for Human Rights and Democracy. Her passion for European Law, International Law and Constitutional Comparative law was strengthened through opportunities to assist professionals within those fields.

She worked as an intern at the Municipal Court in Prague where she focused on migration law. Furthermore, she had the opportunity to work as a research assistant for Dr Bríd Ní Ghráinne on “Safe Zones and International Law”, as well as for Dr Lucia Berdisová in her research on Gender in Constitutionalism. The ultimate experience has led her to Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil, where she is currently writing her thesis on the topic of „Gender and Constitutionalism in Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe“.

In the DialogUE project, she will assist the team members with research and administrative tasks. She will be conducting the „detective work“ and collecting the data necessary for the analysis of the follow-up cases of the Slovak courts.