criminal lawyer, university professor
Prof. dr. Zsolt Szomora obtained his Doctor of Law degree in 2003 from University of Szeged, Faculty of Law, where he also completed a training in economic law and EU law in German, operated together with the University of Potsdam. In 2008 he obtained his PhD, in 2015 he habilitated, and in 2018 he was appointed professor at the Institute of Criminal Sciences at the University of Szeged, Faculty of Law. Since 2016 Prof. dr. Szomora has been the vice dean for educational affairs of the Faculty of Law in Szeged, as well as since 2015 he has been teaching at the Department of Criminal Procedural Law and Penal Law of ELTE Faculty of Law, and he is a temporary lecturer of the post-graduate specialist training programme in Media Law at the Pázmány Péter Catholic University.
His research work focuses on matters of general criminal law and criminal dogmatics, the criminal law of sexual crimes and the constitutional aspects of criminal law. He teaches material criminal law, procedural law, constitutional criminal law and media criminal law. He is a co-author of the Commentary on the Criminal Code (Wolters Kluwer Hungary, editor: Krisztina Karsai). He has taken several, shorter and longer research trips to Austria and Germany. In 2010 he spent a year at the University of Osnabrück with Humboldt scholarship. He was awarded Junior Prima prize (2011, category of Hungarian Science) and Bolyai scholarship (2011-2014), he holds the Master Teacher Gold Medal (2015). He is a member of the Committee of Social Sciences of the Hungarian Accreditation Committee.
In addition to his work as lecturer and researcher, Prof. dr. Szomora maintains close relations also with the sphere of practising lawyers. He completed his bar exam in 2015, he is a censor of the Bar Exam Examination Board and a member of the Forensic Expert Examination Board. Since 2014 he has been the editor in chief of the Explanation of Legal Cases journal.