Meet the team of the Centre for Clinical Legal Education of Law Faculty of Palacký University in Olomouc
OUR TEAM
JUDr. Lucia Madleňáková, Ph.D.
Head of the Centre for Clinical Legal Education
Assistant Professor at the Department of Administrative and Financial Law
e-mail: lucia.madlenakova@upol.cz
Lucia Madleňáková studied at the Faculty of Law, Palacký University where she obtained her Master’s Degree, her Doctoral Degree (JUDr; Doctor of Law) and her PhD. She specialises in administrative law, in particular in legal regulation of churches and freedom of religion, as well as in medical law. All of her submitted thesis concerned those topics and she published several monographies and research papers in the area. She is also a member of the Church Law Society.
Since 2006 when she got involved an European project on Introduction of practical methods in legal education, she focuses on legal clinics. In the framework of the cited project Lucia participated on the establishment of Students Legal Counselling Office and became lecturer of Legal Skills Course and Introduction to Legal Studies, as well as supervisor of Administrative Legal Clinic. The mentioned project was then followed by another one titled Lifelong Learning in Law. Within the second project, Lucia introduced at the Faculty of law of Palacký University a Street Law Programme which she guarantees ever since. She is a member of the Global Alliance for Justice Education (GAJE) and she regularly participates in conferences they organise.
Lucia also provides legal training for employees of the Probation and Mediation Service and of Regional Offices and she is also Attorney specialising in administrative law.
JUDr. Maxim Tomoszek, Ph.D.
Vice-Dean for Bachelor´s and Master´s Study Programmes
Assistant Professor at the Department of Constitutional Law
e-mail: maxim.tomoszek@upol.cz
Maxim Tomoszek started teaching at Law Faculty of Palacký University in 2004. Between 2008 and 2016, he was the head of the Centre for Clinical Legal Education. Since 2016, he serves as vice-dean for education. He obtained a Ph.D. in constitutional law in 2012. During his engagement at Palacký, Maxim has been teaching constitutional law, comparative constitutional law, human rights, various human rights oriented legal clinics (human rights clinic, patients‘ rights clinic, asylum law clinic, anti-discrimination clinic), professional ethics, legal skills and regularly coaches moot court teams for national and international moot court competitions. Since 2018, he also cooperates with Czech Judicial Academy on ethical trainings for Czech judges and consulted on the commentary to Ethical Code of the Union of Judges.
Maxim has been regularly teaching abroad: In 2014, he was a visiting professor at Washington and Lee University, School of Law, in Lexington, Virginia, USA, teaching about protection of fundamental rights in Europe. Since 2017, he teaches in the Master programme in Human Rights in Valencia; he conducted seminars on ethical issues related to students’ work in legal clinics at Warsaw University (2018) and University of Brescia (2019). Since 2017, he collaborates with four other European universities (Luxembourg, Brescia, Bucharest and Roma III) within the framework of the first Erasmus+ project dedicated to clinical legal education: Skills Transfer in Academia: A Renewed Strategy, where he is responsible for preparing the quality standards for legal clinics.
Maxim is dedicated to promoting clinical legal education on international level. Between 2013 and 2019, he was the president of the European Network for Clinical Legal Education, where he now serves as a treasurer. Since 2013, he represents Central and Eastern Europe in the steering committee of the Global Alliance for Justice Education.
He regularly presents at national and international conferences, and publishes about clinical legal education and professional ethics in the Czech Republic and abroad. He also regularly organizes conferences, workshops, trainings and other events related to clinical legal education.
JUDr. Bronislava Wittnerová, MSc
Assistant Professor at the Centre for Clinical Legal Education
e-mail: bronislava.wittnerova@upol.cz
Bronislava obtained her Master’s Degree in 2007 at the Faculty of Law, Palacký University. In 2009 she defended her doctoral thesis titled The Crime of Murder at the Faculty of Law, Charles University and obtained her Doctoral Degree (JUDr). In 2010 she graduated from Brno International Business School (BIBS) obtaining MSc Degree after submitting her Master’s Thesis titled Business Strategy for Funding of Attorney’s Office. At the Faculty of Law in Olomouc, Bronislava teaches the Legal Skills Course, the Legal Internship Course and the Introduction to Legal Studies. She is also a supervisor in the Student’s Legal Counselling Office.
She regularly gives lectures at the Workshop of Legal Clinics and participated on several international conferences on clinical legal education (Bandung 2019, Bratislava 2019). In 2012, 2014 and 2015, Bronislava served as a judge for the Human Rights Moot Court Competition. She is an Attorney specialised in Medical Law. For different organisations she occasionally lectures Contract Law, Anti-Corruption Law and Data Protection.
Mgr. Martina Grochová, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor at the Centre for Clinical Legal Education
e-mail: martina.grochova@upol.cz
Martina Grochová obtained her PhD in Constitutional Law in 2019 at the Faculty of Law of the Masaryk University where she defended her Doctoral Thesis titled Access to the New Forms of Parenthood as Part of the Right to Respect Family and Private Life. During her doctoral studies, she got involved in the teaching of skills-oriented courses and organising other extracurricular activities for students at Masaryk University. She coached the European Human Rights Moot Court Competition teams in Brno in academic years 2017/2018 and 2018/2019; in both years the teams ranked among top ten worldwide and in 2019 the MUNI team won the best written submission award. Martina also introduced in Brno the Street Law Moot Court Competition, a competition for high school students founded at the Faculty of Law of the Palacký University, as well as a clinical course Legal Aid for Victims of Crime. In 2014-2016 Martina was part of the organisation team of the national round of the Jessup Moot Court Competition and of the MjUNI workshop, a play-based human rights workshop for primary schools. Since 2014 she also assists with the organisation of the National Human Rights Moot Court Competition (Lidskoprávní Moot Court).
Martina believes in benefits of connecting academic and practical career and, thus, worked at the Supreme Court, the Constitutional Court, the European Court of Human Rights and the Judicial Academy. Those work experiences helped her to deepen and broaden her knowledge in the fields of her expertise – Human Rights and Children Rights – and enabled her to put her theoretical knowledge in a more practical context. In 2020 Martina got accepted to the University of Oxford MSt programme in International Human Rights Law, a part-time degree designed for young human rights professionals who wish to pursue advanced studies in international human rights. Martina is a member of the Czech Society for European and Comparative Law, the Global Alliance for Justice Education and the Czech Centre for Human Rights and Democracy. She is an expert guarantor of the Judicial Academy’s grant project on the access of vulnerable groups to justice. She gives lectures for the Judicial Academy both in the Czech Republic and Slovakia and presented in numerous domestic and international conferences. She publishes mainly in the area of Human Rights, Children Rights, Family Law and gender equality.