Jan Komárek

Jan Komárek is a Professor of EU law at the University of Copenhagen (currently on leave). In 2025-2027 Jan holds Donatio Universitatis Carolinae Chair at the Faculty of Law, Charles University in Prague, where he pursues a project on the “third role” of a university in a polarised society.

Before coming to Copenhagen, Jan was an assistant and later associate professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science (2010-2017). In 2009-2010 he worked as a legal secretary to the President of the Czech Constitutional Court, between 2004-2006 as a counsellor at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic.

Jan holds degrees from the Charles University in Prague (Mgr. 2001, JUDr. 2002), Stockholm University (LL.M. 2004) and University of Oxford (D.Phil. 2011), where he wrote on “reasoning with previous decisions” – the term he prefers to “precedent” in a comparative context, as the latter has led to lot of misunderstanding between scholars based in either the European-continental or Anglo-American legal tradition.

Besides comparative law and theory Jan has pursued various projects dealing with European constitutional law and theory, most recently through his ERC Starting Grant on European constitutional imaginaries (2019-2025). Two edited volumes have been recently published as part of the project (European Constitutional Imaginaries: Between Ideology and Utopia, OUP 2023 and European Constitutionalism the Other Way Round: From the Periphery to the Centre, CUP 2025). Currently Jan works on a monograph entitled The Imaginary Factory: Constitutional Scholars and EUrope’s Constitutionalism (to be published by the CUP), where he adopts the “cultural study of law” approach to shed light on the intellectual history of EUropean constitutionalism as seen through elite imaginaries.

In his free time Jan climbs a lot, which has made him realise the difference between gravity and gravitas.

Contact: jk9354@nyu.edu

Research Project

Constitutional scholarship under pressure: integrating freedom, power, and accountability for resilience. Constitutional scholarship plays an important role in law and politics of constitutional democracies across the globe. Scholars may act directly in the political and legal system, as they often occupy positions of constitutional/supreme court judges, government officials, or work as their advisors. They influence constitutional law and politics in a less direct way too, acting as experts and commentators on constitutional/political controversies. In the recent years, constitutional scholarship has come under pressure. Its place in law, politics and society is being challenged by the current rise of anti-liberalism. Scholarly authority is also being undermined by a more general scepticism about scientific knowledge and its objectivity. At the same time, an internal critique emerged within constitutional scholarship concerning “scholactivism” - social and political activism by scholars defending liberal constitutionalism against its enemies. Most recently, however, authoritarians have openly declared that “The Universities are the Enemy” and constitutional scholars became the combatants in the “war on universities” – on both sides. My project takes a step back from these still unfolding events and seeks to provide what scholars should be the best at: a greater knowledge about the place of constitutional scholarship in the polarised society. This can be conceptualised alongside three dimensions, which are interrelated, and mutually condition each other: power, freedom, and accountability. The Project will seek to integrate these three dimensions into one, allowing us to better understand their mutual relationships and how they co-constitute each other. While researchers have already addressed some of the questions pertaining to each of the three dimensions, my project seeks to integrate them into a common whole, so that a better understanding of the challenges of anti-liberalism that constitutional scholarship faces today is achieved. Providing this integrated account, informed by the comparative constitutional perspective, will be the key contribution this Project seeks to make.