Ivo Gruev

Biography

Ivo’s research, funded by a Grand Union Scholarship (Economic and Social Research Council) and Merton College, focuses on the rights-protecting function of judicial review in post-authoritarian societies. His project, which is supervised by Professor Catherine O'Regan and Professor Linda Mulcahy, looks at how newly created constitutional courts protect human rights, focusing on individual access to constitutional adjudication. In particular, he is studying the intricacies of the Bulgarian Constitutional Court against the background of the drafting of the 1991 (post-communist) Bulgarian Constitution in its historical and regional context. 

Ivo is the Convenor of the Oxford Transitional Justice Research (OTJR) network and former Chairperson of Oxford Pro Bono Publico (OPBP). He was the inaugural President of the Grand Union Scholars Association (2016-2017). He holds law degrees (MSt in Socio-Legal Research, Merton, 2017; Magister Juris, Balliol, 2015) and a Diploma in Legal Studies (Hertford, 2011) from the University of Oxford, as well as a law degree from the Humboldt University in Berlin (1. Staatsexamen, Berlin-Brandeburg, 2014). During his studies, he has specialised in comparative equality law, international criminal law, public international law, European Union law, and legal philosophy, among other subjects.

Ivo has teaching experience in human rights law, jurisprudence, public international law, EU law, and legal sociology and anthropology. He has taught for the Stanford University Bing Overseas Studies Program and the Washington International Studies Council in Oxford, and is a senior tutor on the Oxford Scholastica Academy summer school. 

He has clerked for the International Criminal Court on the Jean-Pierre Bemba Gombo case (2015) and has worked for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in New York (2017), as a legal consultant at the European Directorate of the German Parliament (2014), and as a research assistant at Humboldt University's Law Faculty (2013-2014). Prior to his graduation from Humboldt, he also completed an internship at the 'International Legal Cooperation and European Questions' Directorate of the Bulgarian Ministry of Justice (2010).

In the fall of 2020, Ivo was a visiting scholar at the Gilbert + Tonkin Centre of Public Law in the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.  This academic visit, generously supported by a grant from the Grand Union Doctoral Training Partnership, was hosted by the Centre's Director Professor Rosalind Dixon, Co-president of the International Society for Public Law: ICON-S. Since 2020, Ivo has been one of the researchers on the international comparative project JUDICON-EU, which uses an innovative empirical methodology to map the diversity and measure the strength of judicial decisions, as well as explain judicial behaviour vis-á-vis the legislative branch in Europe.