Full Professor Jurij Toplak, Ph.D.

E-mail: jurij.toplak@um.si

Telephone: +386 (0)2 250 42 36

Office: 017

Office and Tutoring hours

Department: Department of Constitutional, Administrative, and Financial Law

Courses:

Constitutional Law (lectures, tutorials)

COBISS

SICRIS

Biography:

Biografija:

Law Degree - University of Maribor, 1999
(mentor prof. dr. Rafael Cijan)
LL.M. - Central European University, 2001
(mentor prof. Michel Rosenfeld, Cardozo Law School, NY)
Ph.D. in Law - University of Maribor, 2007
(mentor prof. Daniel H. Lowenstein of UCLA Law School)

Jurij Toplak, Ph.D., is a university professor of law. He has taught since 2000 and chaired the Public Law Department between 2016 and 2022. His research is focused on constitutional law, elections, government, campaign finance, international organisations, and human rights.

Professor Toplak has advised governments worldwide and international organizations Council of Europe, OSCE, ODIHR, European Union and UNDP. He worked three months for the EU in Uganda and served on core teams in election observation and expert missions in Finland, Canada, Latvia, France, Malta, Monaco, the US, Serbia, Montenegro and elsewhere.

He is among the leading European election law authorities. With Daniel Smilov, he co-edited Political Finance and Corruption in Eastern Europe (Ashgate, 2008). With David Schultz, he co-edited the Routledge Handbook of Election Law (2022), the most thorough comparative book on the law of democracy on six continents, launched at Keble College, Oxford University, in August 2022.

In April 2017, he presented his research on gay rights at the Political Geography conference at Harvard School of Government and gave two lectures on democracy and Marxism to Harvard University students. He gave guest talks worldwide, including at universities Yale, Columbia, UCLA, Washington State University, Valencia, and Washington & Lee. He served as a Fulbright scholar at the UCLA School of Law and researched at Georgetown, Oxford, Central European University, and elsewhere. The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The Guardian and The Boston Globe published Professor Toplak's legal views.

He is the coordinator of the International Association of Constitutional Law (IACL) research group on freedom of expression, and board member of the Research Committee on political finance and corruption (RC20) of the International Political Science Association (IPSA).

Jure Toplak has led impact litigation projects and was involved in a fair trial, election law, free speech, government transparency, equality, disability, discrimination and torture cases before the highest national courts and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg. In 2017, he wrote a challenge to the referendum results that led to the first-ever public hearing by the Supreme Court of Slovenia and the annulment of referendum results.

He is the Chair of the It's About People conference of Europe's sciences and arts leaders and scholars, held annually by the European Academy of Sciences and Arts and Alma Mater Europaea, where he served as the Executive Vice President/Provost between 2016 and 2022. For over fifteen years, he has managed higher education institutions, served as a dean, supervised doctoral programs and dissertations, built global academic partnerships and led the development of in-person and online social studies, humanities, health and business education.

Since 2019, he has been a visiting professor at the Fordham Law School in New York. He has served as the board member or the CEO of several profit and non-profit academic institutions and served on three corporate boards. He was a member of the Central Election Commission of Slovenia for from 2000 to 2012.

Professor Toplak is a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. In 2000, the Slovenian Lawyers’ Association awarded Jure Toplak with the 'Young Lawyer of the Year' award for his book on electoral redistricting, and in 2022, with the title 'Lawyer of the Year'.

He has published seven books, 45 articles and over 300 other bibliographic items, including book chapters and published lectures. Publications are in English, German, Slovenian, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, Albanian and Bulgarian language. Some of them are:

Selected Books:

Smilov, D., & Toplak, J. (Eds.). (2008). Political Finance and Corruption in Eastern Europe: The Transition Period. Ashgate.

Schultz, D., & Toplak, J. (Eds.). (2022). The Routledge Handbook of Election Law. Routledge.

Selected Articles:

Toplak, J. (2008). Equal Voting Weight of All: Finally One Person, One Vote from Hawaii to Maine. Temple Law Review, Vol. 81, 123-175.

Toplak, J. (2017). Preferential Voting: Definition and Classification. Lex Localis, 15(4), 737-761.

Toplak, J. (2019). Money and Elections in Malta. Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 28(1), 91-107.

Zakari, A., & Toplak, J. (2021). Investigation into the social behavioral effects on a country's ecological footprint: Evidence from Central Europe. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 170, 120891.

Selected Talks:

Toplak, J. (2020). Disability Voting Law in Europe. Harvard Law School Project on Disability. Harvard University.

Pinto-Duschinsky, Sajó, A., Toplak, J., M., Ribičič, C., Williams, R., and Baroness R. Deech (2022). Post-Holocaust Justice. It’s About People 2022. European Academy of Sciences and Arts.