More information

Curriculum Vitae (1950–2025)

He pursued his legal studies at the Faculty of Law, Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), between 1969 and 1974. He wrote his thesis on “Legal Issues of Economic Competition”, which he defended with distinction. He graduated in 1974 with a summa cum laude distinction.

From 1974 to 2012, he taught at the Department of Civil Law at ELTE Faculty of Law. Until 1976, he served as a junior assistant, then as an assistant lecturer until 1982, as an assistant professor until 1991, and as an associate professor until 1999. From 2000 onward, he held the title of full professor. From the outset, he led seminars and delivered specialized courses covering the entire field of civil law. He introduced new elective subjects such as "The Law of Commons," "Theories of Property," and "Subjective and Fundamental Rights." Beginning in 1978, he gave lectures to correspondence students, from 1984 to evening students, and from 1986 to full-time students. From 1992 onward, he independently delivered lectures on the entire subject of civil law to individual student cohorts.

In 1991, he published his first university textbook, titled “Property Law.” In 1993, drawing on modern European textbooks, he revised and expanded it under the title “Outline of Property Law.” Since then, the book has been reissued in several revised editions. In 1996, together with his colleague and co-author György Bíró from the University of Miskolc, he published the “General Principles” volume of Hungarian Civil Law, which was most recently revised in 2013. In 2001, he co-authored “Outline of Personal Law” with his departmental colleague László Székely. For the ELTE Institute for Continuing Legal Education, he wrote course materials titled “Outline of Civil Law” in 1996 and “Basic Concepts of Civil Law” in 1997. Based on these, he prepared a college-level textbook titled “Foundations of Civil Law” in 2001. He published approximately one hundred scholarly articles and chapters in professional journals and volumes across various subfields of civil law.

In 1991, he defended his Candidate of Sciences dissertation entitled “The Systemic Transition of Property Law.” Since 1992, he held the academic title of Candidate of Legal Sciences and was a member of the Public Body of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. From 1996 to 2015, he served as Head of Department at the Győr campus of ELTE (later integrated into Széchenyi István University), where he organized civil law education. Between 1998 and 2002, he held the Széchenyi Professorial Fellowship. On March 22, 1999, he delivered his habilitation lecture titled “The Socialization and Privatization of Ownership,” and with the successful completion of the habilitation process, he was appointed full professor as of July 1, 2000.

One year later, the National Assembly of Hungary elected him as the Parliamentary Commissioner for Citizens’ Rights for a six-year term. On April 21, 2007, he was elected as a Judge of the Constitutional Court for a nine-year term. From February 25, 2015, to April 21, 2016, he served as President of the Constitutional Court of Hungary. He held a professorship at the Department of Civil Law and Civil Procedure at the Deák Ferenc Faculty of Law, Széchenyi István University until his death.