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History of the Department of Constitutional Law

The Department of Constitutional Law in its current structure has already been an established unit (Department of Public and Administrative Law ) of the University of Cluj Napoca at the time of its foundation, and it became an independent unit in 1908. The Cluj Napoca University was later moved to Szeged, where the Faculty of Law and the Department of Constitutional Law exists ever since.

The Department is honored to safeguard the memories of great legal thinkers and scholars who had had taken part in its activities, such as: Ödön Polner (1865-1961), Csekey István (1889-1963), Bibó István Jr. (1909-1979), József Szabó (1909-1992), István Kovács (1921-1990), István Szentpéteri (1926-2002).

The Professors of the Department are influenced by the heritage of their predecessors vested in pursuing the traditional point of view as regards legal research and education. They examine the development of the constitution and parliamentary law and conduct research in the interconnecting fields of public and constitutional law, comparative constitutional law and sociology.

As part of this heritage, the Department is focused on providing a broad overlook of legal systems all around the globe and on incentivizing the openness towards newly arising challenges in constitutional law in legal education. The Department represents these objectives in postdoctoral programs and in research and we are driven by these goals in our international cooperations (Belgium, France) as well.

Legal Education and Principles, Creating Bridges in Europe

The Department intensively participates in the full- and part-time trainings of the Faculty, both in Szeged and in Kecskemét; in the education and orientation of researchers; in domestic and international research projects; in organizing conferences and roundtables and, in connection to this, in various publications as well.

It is considered a priority that, as part of our international scientific co-operations, foreign guest lecturers give lectures, thus participating in the European education of the students and providing samples and views of foreign regulations as well as their own points of view. At the invitation of Professor László Trócsányi (head of department from 1994) the following guests honored us with lectures:

• Jean-Marie Auby (University of Bordeaux),
• Dominique Rousseau and Alexander Viala (University of Montpellier),
• Francis Delpérée, Marc Verdussen, Philip Coppens (Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve),
• Vincent Berger (Secretary General of the ECHR),
• Rusen Ergec (Université de Libre de Bruxelles),
• Barnabás Rácz (University of Michigan).

Francis Delpérée was awarded with the title Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Szeged in 2002.

Besides our foreign guests, our full-time students are introduced to the practical application of constitutional law by famous domestic practitioners. Among others the former Attorney General (Kálmán Györgyi), the former president of the Hungarian National Bank (Zsigmond Járai), the president of the State Audit Office of Hungary (Árpád Kovács), the former Parliamentary Commissioner for Freedom of Information and Data Protection (László Majtényi), the former official of the Ministry of the Interior responsible for citizenship affairs (Mária Ugróczky) held lectures on the Faculty.