JUDr. Kateřina Šimáčková

JUDr. Kateřina Šimáčková, Ph.D., has served as a Justice of the Constitutional Court of the Czech Republic since 2013. From 1988 to 1990, she worked as a lawyer at a regional hygiene station in Brno, Czech Republic, and then as a judicial law clerk to Justice JUDr. Antonín Procházka at the Constitutional Court of the Czechoslovak Federal Republic. From 1994 to 2009 she worked as a practicing lawyer, covering a number of areas; she frequently appeared as a legal representative in proceedings before the Constitutional Court of the Czech Republic. In 2009, she switched from advocacy to the judiciary and was appointed a judge at the Supreme Administrative Court; in August 2013 she was appointed a Justice to the Constitutional Court of the Czech Republic.

In the years 2007 to 2009, she was a member of the Government Legislative Council. She was appointed as a Member of the Committee for the Selection of Judges to the EU Civil Service Tribunal by the Council of the European Union for the period 2008 to 2012. Since 2010, she has been a substitute member of the European Commission for Democracy through Law (the “Venice Commission”) for the Czech Republic and a member of the examination committee for judicial examinations in the Czech Republic.

Since 1990, in addition to her work as a practicing lawyer and later a judge, she has also lectured at the Department of Constitutional Law and Political Science at the Faculty of Law at the Masaryk University in Brno, where she also defended her dissertation on the topic Taxation and the Rule of Law. Her teaching and publication activity focuses primarily on the issue of fundamental rights and freedoms. She teaches courses in constitutional law, human rights and the judiciary, political science, media law and church law, and also runs a clinic in media law and medical law, a course in human rights in practice, a winter school of human rights, and a human rights moot court.

Next to a large number of academic publications, she has also co-edited a book titled Male Law: Are Legal Rules Neutral?, and co-authored several books, including: The Future of the State?; Human Rights: A (Non-) Sense of Czech Politics?; Twenty Years of the European Convention in the Czech Republic and in Slovakia; Communist Law in Czechoslovakia; she is also a co-author of legal commentaries to the Act on the Illegality of the Communist Regime, to the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms, and to the Czech Civil Code.

She is a member of the Scientific Board of the Faculty of Law at the Charles University in Prague, an ad hoc Judge at the European Court of Human Rights, a certified trainer of the Council of Europe Programme on Human Rights Education for Legal Professionals (HELP), a chair of the Brno group of the Church Law Society, and a member of the Czech Society for European and Comparative Law.