Symposium: Women, Gender, and Constitutionalism in Central and Eastern Europe

Terezie Boková is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law, Masaryk University, Brno. She studied at Masaryk University (Mgr, PhD) and the University of Oxford (MJur). She works as a law clerk at the Czech Constitutional Court. She has also previously worked as a law clerk at the Czech Supreme Administrative Court and as a legal assistant to the Public Defender of Rights (ombuds). Her research interests include freedom of expression and media freedom, asylum law and equality-related issues.

Tímea Drinóczi is a Hungarian professor of constitutional law. She is currently a research professor at the Mykolas Romeris University, Lithuania, a research affiliate at the Faculty of Law at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, and CEU Democracy Institute, Hungary.

Email: drinoczi.time@gmail.com (primary), drinoczi.time@mruni.eu, tdrinoczi@direito.ufmg.br

Barbara Havelková is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law and a Tutorial Fellow at St Hilda's College. She was previously the Shaw Foundation Fellow at Lincoln College and held other posts at the University of Cambridge (Emmanuel College) and Oxford (Balliol). She worked for Clifford Chance Prague, trained at the Legal Service of the European Commission and in the Chambers of AG Poiares Maduro at the Court of Justice of the European Union. She was an academic visitor at several law schools, including Harvard University and University of Michigan as a Fulbright scholar and the Jean Monnet Center of NYU Law School as an Emile Noël Fellow. 

Barbara’s research and teaching interests include gender legal studies and feminist jurisprudence, equality and anti-discrimination law, constitutional law, EU law and law in post-socialist transitions. She is a senior member of the Law Faculty's Feminist Jurisprudence Discussion Group.  Barbara teaches Constitutional Law, EU Law and Feminist Jurisprudence to undergraduates and Comparative Equality Law on the BCL/MJur programme. She also convenes the undergraduate third year option Feminist Perspectives on the Law. Her book, 'Gender Equality in Law: Uncovering the Legacies of Czech State Socialism', was published by Hart/Bloomsbury in 2017 and received an honourable mention from the judges of the BASEES Women’s Forum Prize for 2019. A volume Barbara co-edited with Mathias Möschel on ‘Anti-Discrimination Law in Civil Law Jurisdictions’ came our with Oxford University Press in 2019.

Barbara has also been active as an expert and an academic in the Czech Republic. Between 2014 and 2017, Barbara acted as an Advisor to the Prime Minister of the Czech Republic on issues of gender and law. She is the author of a monograph ‘Equality of women and men in remuneration’ (Rovnost v odměňování žen a mužů; Auditorium, 2007), co-author of the leading 'Commentary on the Czech Anti-Discrimination Act' (Antidiskriminační zákon. Komentář, with P Boučková et al; C.H.Beck, 1st edition 2010, 2nd edition 2016) and co-editor and co-author of the edited volume What to do with prostitution? Public policies and the rights of persons in prostitution (Co s prostitucí? Veřejné politiky a práva osob v prostituci, with B Hančilová; SLON, 2014). A collection of essays on gender and the law, 'Men’s Laws: Are Legal Rules Neutral?' (Mužské právo. Jsou právní pravidla neutrální?), which Barbara co-edited and co-authored, came out in 2020 with WoltersKluwer.

Ana Horvat Vuković joined the Zagreb Law School Department of Constitutional Law in 2007. Her main area of interest has long been anti-discrimination law through the anti-subordination lens, i.e. the avenues of safeguarding the substantive equality of political minorities such as women (issues of equal citizenship, SRRs, and power-sharing in decision-making fora), racial/ethnic minorities (her 2013 SJD thesis on Indian substantive equality law, and work on intersectional discrimination of Roma women), and the LGBTIQA+ community (issues of equal parenthood, and misconstruction of hate speech as covered by the “religious speech” exception).

In her other work, she also underlines issues of equal citizenship, autonomy, self-determination and dignity, be it when dealing with various fundamental human rights or issues of (EU) federalist theory.

She is the co-founder of Zagreb Law School’s “Women’s Rights” course, as well as the “Affirmative action in comparative constitutional law” course.

She is also a Deputy Director of the Zagreb Law School Postgraduate School of Public Law and Public Administration, a member of the Ombudswoman's Council for Human Rights, and Administrative Board Chair for the City of Zagreb's Shelter for Victims of Domestic Violence. She is also proud to be a longstanding academic mentor at the Free Legal Advice Center at the Zagreb School of Law, and a supervisor of graduate, postgraduate and S.J.D. theses.

Kate O'Regan, Emeritus Professor of Human Rights Law at Oxford, was the inaugural Director of the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights (2016-2025) and a former judge of the South African Constitutional Court (1994 – 2009). In the mid-1980s she practiced as a lawyer in Johannesburg in a variety of fields, but especially labour law and land law, representing many of the emerging trade unions and their members, as well as communities threatened with eviction under apartheid land laws.  In 1990, she joined the Faculty of Law at UCT where she taught a range of courses including race, gender and the law, labour law, civil procedure and evidence. Since her fifteen-year term at the South African Constitutional Court ended in 2009,  she has amongst other things served as an ad hoc judge of the Supreme Court of Namibia (from 2010 - 2016), Chairperson of the Khayelitsha Commission of Inquiry into allegations of police inefficiency and a breakdown in trust between the police and the community of Khayelitsha (2012 – 2014), and as a member of the boards or advisory bodies of many NGOs working in the fields of democracy, the rule of law, human rights and equality.

Sarah Ouředníčková is a DPhil in Law candidate researching the recognition and participation of LGBTQ+ people through courts. She is supervised by Kate O’Regan. She holds degrees from the University of Oxford (MJur, 2023) and Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic (Mgr - Master in Law, 2022).

During her DPhil, she has been a Graduate Teacher at the University of Oxford on the Opportunity Oxford & Oxford Law Springboard Programme, an access and outreach programme for disadvantaged and underrepresented offer-holders in law, in 2023 and 2024, a Research Assistant at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights in 2023/2024 and a Graduate Research Resident at Bonavero in 2025.

Lídia Balogh lives in Budapest, where she works as a research fellow at the Institute for Legal Studies, ELTE Centre for Social Sciences, and serves as a visiting lecturer at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Eötvös Loránd University. As a freelance researcher, she has contributed to projects of the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights and currently serves as a gender equality expert within the European Network of Legal Experts in Gender Equality and Non-Discrimination (EELN). Since the mid-2000s, she has been actively involved in Hungarian civil society, contributing to projects and advocacy initiatives of human rights and pro-democracy NGOs, and women’s and Roma rights organisations in particular.
 

Jessie Barton Hronešová is a Lecturer in Political Sociology at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London and co-director of the Center for Places, Identities and Memories. Her work focuses on dealing with the past, memory politics, and victimhood in the former Yugoslavia and Central Europe. She holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford.

Lucia Berdisová is a legal scholar working at the Institute of State and Law of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and at the Faculty of Law of Trnava University. Her research focuses on constitutional law, human rights, and legal philosophy. She has published primarily on the intersection of human rights, normativity, legal ethics, and the role of legal institutions in safeguarding constitutional values. She is also the author of a book on the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy on legal thinking. Lucia’s work includes advising governmental and non-governmental organizations on issues of constitutionalism and human rights. She is a recipient of the FLAMMA Award for inspirational Czech and Slovak female lawyers and an award from the Slovak Ombudsperson for her contributions to protecting the human rights of LGBTQ+ people.

Mara Malagodi is a Reader in Law at Warwick Law School. She is the co-founder and co-director of the Centre for Constitutions in Context, and the co-editor-in-chief of Constitutional Studies, the journal of the International Association of Constitutional Law (IACL) co-published with the Comparative Constitutions Project (CCP). Dr Malagodi is the author of the monographs Constitutional Nationalism and Legal Exclusion in Nepal (2013) with Oxford University Press and The Constitutional System of Nepal – A Contextual Analysis (forthcoming 2026) with Hart Publishing. She is co-editing a four-volume series on Asian Comparative Constitutional Law (2023-26) and co-edited a volume on Gender, Sexuality and Constitutionalism in Asia (2024) for Hart Publishing. Her work has appeared in the International Journal of Constitutional Law, the Journal of Law & Society, the Federal Law Review, the Law & History Review, the Modern Law Review, the European Constitutional Law Review, The Lancet Regional Health - South East Asia, and numerous other journals and edited collections. Dr Malagodi is a non-practising barrister, a scholar of the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple, and an award-winning documentary filmmaker.