Péter Paczolay

Péter Paczolay (20 May 1956 in Budapest) is a Hungarian jurist, political scientist and university professor.

Education and academic career In 1975 Paczolay started his studies at the Faculty of Law of Eötvös Loránd University, where he obtained his law degree in 1980. He returned to the university in 1983, where he started working as a research fellow in the Department of Political Science and Legal Theory. In 1986, he became a full-time university lecturer as an associate professor, and in 1990 he moved to the Department of Political Science. In the meantime, in 1992, he was appointed Head of the Department of Political Science at the Faculty of Law and Political Sciences of the József Attila University. In 1994, he was elected Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Law and Political Sciences in Szeged, a post he held until 1998. From 1991 to 1992 he was a research fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC.

He obtained his doctorate in 1989 He was elected a member of the Political Science Committee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 2002, he was elected a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts in Salzburg. In addition to his academic posts, he joined the newly established Constitutional Court in 1990 as one of its senior advisers. In 1996, he was appointed Secretary General of the body. He won the Justitia Regnorum Fundamentum Award in 2015.